Digital Thread for Sustainable Propulsion System Design

Our lab advances structured Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) methods to create a connected, traceable digital thread for aircraft electrification and hybridized propulsion architectures. As technical documentation grows increasingly fragmented across disciplines, engineers face rising integration and communication burdens. We address this by developing tool-agnostic MBSE frameworks that link requirements, functions, logic, and physical design in a unified system model.

Using SysML and the requirements–functional–logical–physical (R-F-L-P) paradigm, we are building a scalable digital environment in MagicDraw that captures system requirements, behavior, and architecture at multiple levels of fidelity. Our approach begins with a clean decomposition of requirements and functions, ensuring alignment with verification and maintenance processes. We then extend these models to represent propulsion hybridization—comparing baseline and hybridized Inner Fixed Structure (IFS) architectures—to evaluate design tradeoffs and explore the impact of advanced technologies on sustainability and system performance.

Building on our previous work in engine inlet design, our graph-based digital thread approach has demonstrated the ability to visually capture requirements space, enable conceptual test-bedding, and support collaborative analysis (Jagtap et al., 2025). In continued collaboration with Collins Aerospace, we are applying these methods to model hybrid-electric propulsion systems, expanding the analytical and exploratory potential of MBSE for next-generation aircraft design.

By integrating requirements, functions, and components into a single authoritative model, our framework enables rapid design iteration, early identification of integration risks, and certification-ready documentation. The result is a digital engineering process that strengthens traceability, accelerates decision-making, and supports more reliable and sustainable product development.