SUMMARY

Today’s market is driven by the desire for increasingly complex products that perform well from manufacturing to disposal. Designing these products for multiple lifecycle phases requires effective management of engineering knowledge and integration of this knowledge across multiple disciplines. However, management techniques are often very costly and managers can easily become bogged down with large quantities of information, slowing the design process and degrading knowledge transfer. Thus, a need exists for effective yet inexpensive knowledge management. One approach for decreasing the costs associated with generating design knowledge is to reuse modules of existing knowledge. In Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE), information about a design is stored formally in knowledge structures, or models, including requirements, stakeholders, and analyses. To support the reuse of the existing knowledge in design, MBSE is used as a basis for integrating engineering analysis models (EAMs). In this thesis, a framework is presented for model classification that organizes models by components and aspects. This scheme is found to be useful in classifying EAMs for reuse by storing them, as a set, in containers known as Multi-Aspect Component Models (MAsCoMs). Each model in a MAsCoM is related to the formal structure model of a physical component and to the aspects of the component that the model represents. The Object Management Group’s Systems Modeling Language (OMG SysML), is used to implement MAsCoMs. Validation of the MAsCoM concept is performed with two hydraulic design examples, including a log splitter, scissor lift, and hydraulic excavator. In these examples, MAsCoMs improve design value by 1) Classifying modular and composable EAMs for reuse in multiple disciplines, and 2) Providing knowledge modules to computer-automated algorithms for the future automated composition of component models into system models to perform system-level analyses.