SBE Primer

SBE Platform Overview

The SBE Platform provides a unified approach for connecting diverse engineering tools into a coherent digital engineering ecosystem. By standardizing integration patterns, offering scalable infrastructure, and enabling end-to-end traceability, SBE supports the creation of a true digital thread across the system development lifecycle. This section introduces the purpose, concepts, architecture, and workflows that define the SBE Platform.

1. Purpose of the SBE Platform

The Challenge: Siloed Engineering Tools and Data

Engineering organizations often rely on a wide range of specialized tools—requirements management systems, modeling environments, simulation engines, configuration management repositories, and test execution platforms. Each of these tools produces valuable data, but because they operate in isolation, information is often duplicated, inconsistent, or inaccessible to stakeholders outside the immediate tool domain.

These silos create major challenges:

• Manual re-entry of data across tools leads to errors.

• Engineers lack end-to-end visibility across the lifecycle.

• Traceability between requirements, models, tests, and deployed systems is fragmented.

• Collaboration across teams and organizations is hindered.

The Vision: A Connected Digital Engineering Ecosystem

The SBE Platform addresses these challenges by providing a standards-based integration framework that connects heterogeneous tools into a shared ecosystem. Instead of replacing existing investments, SBE enables them to interoperate—bridging the gap between domains, disciplines, and lifecycle phases.

Benefits of the SBE Platform

By adopting SBE, organizations realize:

• Interoperability: Seamless exchange of data between tools without bespoke point-to-point interfaces.

• Traceability: Persistent linkages across requirements, models, analyses, and verification data.

• Digital Thread Continuity: A connected lifecycle where information flows forward and backward, supporting impact analysis, compliance audits, and decision-making.

• Reduced Integration Costs: A repeatable, adapter-based approach lowers the cost of onboarding new tools.

• Enterprise Readiness: Designed for secure, on-premises deployment within defense environments.

2. Core Concepts

Hub-and-Spoke Architecture

At the heart of the SBE Platform is a hub-and-spoke design:

• The Hub acts as the central integration backbone. It provides shared services such as data persistence, messaging, identity management, and governance.

• Spokes (Adapters) connect each external tool to the hub, translating tool-specific APIs and models into a common, standardized interface.

This architecture avoids brittle point-to-point connections and ensures that each tool only needs to integrate once—to the hub—rather than to every other tool individually.

Adapters

An adapter is the primary integration mechanism within SBE. Each adapter:

• Connects to a specific tool (e.g., MagicDraw, DOORS, Teamcenter).

• Translates between the tool’s internal data structures and SBE’s standardized ontology, ensuring consistency.

• Implements interface contracts so that all adapters present data in a uniform way, regardless of the underlying tool.

• Provides consistent semantics across heterogeneous systems, enabling cross-tool queries and traceability.

Adapters may support one or more modes of interaction, including query, synchronization, and event-driven updates.

Digital Thread

SBE’s ultimate goal is to support the digital thread:

• A linked chain of artifacts spanning requirements, architecture, design, analysis, verification, and sustainment.

• Example: A requirement in DOORS can be traced to a SysML model element in MagicDraw, which can be linked to a test case in a test execution system.

• These relationships are not hard-coded but expressed in a common semantic model, enabling analytics, dashboards, and compliance reporting.

3. How Adapters Work

Adapters follow a standard lifecycle, ensuring predictable and secure operation across all integrations.

1. Installation & Configuration

   • Deployed within the organization’s secured environment.

   • Configured to connect to the target tool using approved credentials, endpoints, and policies.

2. Authentication & Connection

   • Adapters authenticate with the target tool’s API using secure protocols.

   • Connections respect the tool’s native permissions and role-based access control.

3. Mapping Data Models

   • Each adapter maps tool-specific constructs (e.g., SysML Blocks, DOORS requirements, Teamcenter parts) into SBE’s ontology.

   • This ensures that data can be queried consistently across different tool domains.

4. Data Flows

   • Push: Adapters can publish updates from the tool to the hub.

   • Pull: Adapters can retrieve data on demand from the tool.

   • Sync: Adapters can synchronize deltas between tool state and hub representation.

   • Query: Adapters support graph-based queries, enabling navigation of relationships across the digital thread.

5. Error Handling & Resilience

   • Standardized logging and error codes.

   • Retry and backoff strategies for tool downtime.

   • Isolation of adapter failures to prevent cascading system impact.

4. SBE Services and Infrastructure

Core Services

The SBE Platform provides several shared services to support integration at scale:

• Data Hub: Central repository for normalized artifacts and relationships.

• Identity & Access Management (IAM): Integration with enterprise authentication, ensuring access control and auditability.

• Messaging/Event Bus: Enables event-driven updates and synchronization between tools.

• Ontology & Schema Management: Governs the semantic definitions used across adapters.

• Monitoring & Logging: Provides observability into adapter and hub activity.

Deployment Considerations

• On-Premises: All components are deployable within secured defense networks, with no reliance on public cloud.

• Security Boundaries: Adapters and hub components respect organizational and program-level security separations.

• Scalability: Multiple hubs can be federated for large enterprises.

Governance & Versioning

• Centralized governance of ontologies, schemas, and adapter interface contracts.

• Version-controlled adapters ensure that upgrades do not break downstream integrations.

5. Extensibility and Scalability

The SBE Platform is designed to evolve with the enterprise:

• Adding New Adapters

  • Adapters can be developed for any tool with an accessible API.

  • Development follows a published SDK and contract specification.

• Supporting New Standards/Ontologies

  • Ontologies can be extended to support emerging standards (SysML v2, OSLC, etc.).

  • Custom domain-specific ontologies can also be integrated.

• Scaling Enterprise Deployments

  • Horizontal scaling of hub services to support thousands of users.

  • Multi-program and multi-organization federation.

  • High-availability and redundancy features for mission-critical deployments.

6. Example Usage Scenarios

To illustrate the value of SBE, consider the following workflows:

• SysML Model Linked to Requirements and Test Data

  • An engineer authors requirements in DOORS.

  • A systems modeler in MagicDraw satisfies those requirements with SysML elements.

  • A test engineer links validation procedures in a test management system back to the requirements.

  • Using SBE, all these artifacts are connected, enabling traceability reports from requirement → design → test result.

• Impact Analysis Across Tools

  • A change to a requirement triggers an event in the hub.

  • Dependent SysML blocks and related test cases are automatically flagged.

  • Engineers receive notifications, ensuring coordinated updates across domains.

• Role-Based Benefits

  • Engineer: Sees contextually relevant data from other domains without leaving their native tool.

  • Administrator: Manages adapters centrally with consistent deployment and monitoring.

  • Integrator/Digital Thread Specialist: Configures cross-tool relationships using SBE’s ontology rather than custom code.