Bootstrapping a trustworthy and seamless digital engineering appliance

Abstract

Digital engineering is an organizational effort that currently relies on the complex networked integration of heterogeneous computer hardware and software components to maintain a cohesive digital model of the system-of-interest: its Authoritative Source of Truth. The unfortunate truth is that these computer components contain myriad known and unknown defects and their many interfaces cause severe fragility, adding significant cost, risk, and schedule to projects and to the information technology infrastructure that supports them. In this situation, additional resources must be allocated to defect remediation and the gluing of software and data components together with ad-hoc solutions, or to rely on expensive third-party solutions that further accrete the infrastructure. While interoperability by means of Application Programming Interfaces exists in islands of support and is offered by, e.g. the Systems Modeling Language version 2, as the way forward, the foundations upon which these software-intensive systems are built are nevertheless untrustworthy and critically vulnerable. This dissertation argues that clean-slate approach is necessary to address this mess: a system of interrelated problems. The needs of digital engineering stakeholders motivate a computing system architecture that guarantees consistency and coherence, is independently auditable, and is trustworthy based on strong evidence gathered from a full-source bootstrap and end-to-end formal verification, to achieve correctness-by-construction of itself and of the systems-of-interest it is employed to specify. Such a cyber-system, specifically designed for digital engineering activities, is termed a seamless digital engineering information appliance, and represents a grand challenge in digital engineering research. By applying a transdisciplinary systems engineering approach to this problem space, the assured preservation of bidirectional traceability of the stakeholder needs and requirements, detailed design specifications, and verification proof certificates becomes achievable. A systems approach to human factors and security will then result in a high-assurance, malleable human-computer interface with fine-grained security controls suited to the needs of digital engineering. Seamless Digital Engineering is defined as a digital engineering tooling paradigm, contrasted with existing digital engineering integration patterns, and characterized with the seamless integration pattern and a set of architecture tenets to guide surveys of the solutions space. Rationale of the grand challenge is presented. The natural language definition is further clarified using the expressive power of formal ontologies, resulting in ontological definitions-by-relations based on relevant systems and software engineering standards. The concept of seamless is disambiguated using the SQuaRE product quality model, separating it into seamless integration and seamless interaction capability quality characteristics, and seamless quality-in-use characteristics. The Seamless Digital Engineering Ontology includes over 500 concepts and is published open-source in a standard machine-readable format. An open-source SysML profile for digital requirements engineering is presented and validated in real-world projects, representing the preferred model-based technique for developing requirements in the seamless digital engineering context. Finally, the Seamless Digital Engineering Reference Architecture defined in SysML v2 is presented, which captures essential digital engineering stakeholder goals, objectives, and needs. This reference architecture specifies multiple trustworthy bootstrap paths for the proposed seamless digital engineering appliance, with the explicit goal of bootstrapping a powerful, high-assurance digital engineering meta-language. Together, these open-source models form the basis of understanding the grand challenge so that a detailed definition of the Seamless Digital Engineering Reference Architecture can proceed.