Moxie 1.4 Release – Bringing Behavior to Trade Studies

The newest release of Moxie (1.4) provides a significant leap forward when evaluating and understanding systematic behavioral interactions and the resultant emergent behaviors as part of their system design process. Historically, engineering organizations used ModelCenter to link tools into complex, interconnected workflows to understand how perturbations to the structural definitions are related and where the sensitivities in the design are.

Now, Moxie can connect to ModelCenter and incorporate behavioral analysis into existing processes. With Moxie incorporated into the ModelCenter ecosystem and workflows, you can now exercise the structural and behavioral aspects of your systems in ways you never could before.

Let’s look at an example to understand the impacts that this capability will have on our engineering processes. Suppose we want to evaluate the design of a simple system receiver payload hosted on an aircraft. This “system” as described is seen below. It involves the parent airframe and the receiver payload, which is defined as a physical antenna and a data recording mechanism.

Simple System Model for the Aircraft and Receiver

In the past, given a reference scenario, we could use tools like Ansys HFSS and STK to optimize the antenna design, placement, and orientation on the aircraft based on the ability to “collect” all the targets within the scenario. We could link the structural aspects like the antenna design to trade study parameters and then evaluate the scenario with STK. We might even go so far as to optimize something like coverage duration over the targets.

Sample Design Reference Mission for the Simple Receiver System

Historically, where this process would break down is in the “logical” interactions between systems or subsystems. What if the detections of the transmitters by our receiver were just the start? What if we need to model the recording of that signal, what if that recording process needs a certain period of time for the recording to be valid, or what happens if the link breaks while we are recording the signal?

Sample Moxie Empowered State Machines for the Receiver System

Previous versions of Moxie already enabled us to simulate these “logical” situations using the definition of the system and corresponding behaviors modeled in SysML. Moxie 1.4 introduces this capability into the existing ModelCenter workflow alongside other analysis tools, enabling you to address the system design and optimization problem from the structural and behavioral sides of the problem within the same workflow. These types of analysis are no longer a decoupled process.

The Moxie plugin now exposes the instance diagram that we use to configure the simulations to ModelCenter (14.5). The values defined on the instance diagram now become part of our trade studies and optimization workflows.

Using our example, the ability to detect a signal based on the physical design and placement of the antenna is now intrinsically linked to the logical representation of the signal detection and recording process. The full simulation is automated and orchestrated within a ModelCenter workflow with all the engineering and analytic capability and insight that entails.

For more information, head over to the Moxie page and check out the Moxie Help.