From fly-by-wire avionics to nuclear power control and protection systems, from ASIC designs to satellite communications networks, modern systems of all kinds are more complex today than at any other time in history. Composed of a vast web of interlocking puzzle pieces—machine parts, actuators, and sensors; standards and norms; interactions between software, firmware, hardware, cloud services, and regulatory requirements—these systems’ sheer size and intricacy makes them difficult and expensive to understand, maintain, or optimize, and they’re only becoming more and more complicated.
Digital Engineering is a kind of digital cartography for complex systems. By meticulously defining each component part within a system, as well as their functions and relationships within that system, digital engineers create detailed models that serve as an authoritative source of truth. These digital models allow engineers and researchers to examine and explore a complex system and see how it works in various configurations and at varying levels of detail.
Crucially, Digital Engineering also allows users to experiment with new designs, upgrades, or changes within a system and its environment in a virtual workspace. Once mapped out in sufficient detail, digital engineering models can reveal, for example, how a helicopter will respond to a proposed software upgrade, or the relative efficiencies of various electrical configurations within a building’s architectural design.
Such experimentation and testing in a digital environment is often dramatically faster and cheaper than actually building and testing prototypes in the real world, allowing for quick iteration and, ultimately, better quality and results.
At Galois, our researchers focus on a variety of digital engineering areas including:
- Digital Twins
- Model-Based Security Engineering
- High-assurance Cyber-physical Systems
- Model-Based Software, Hardware, and Systems Engineering
- Model-Based Domain and Requirements Engineering
- Model-Based Product Line Engineering
- System, Product, and Platform Validation and Certification
- Safety, Resiliency, and Fault Management
- Digital First Acquisition and Sustainment
- Architecture Centric Virtual Integration
- Autonomy and Automated Reasoning