Digital Transformation in Aircraft Design and Certification: Developing Requirements for Modeling Regulatory Documentation

Abstract

Aircraft design and development is complex and regulated by increasingly stringent regulatory documentation. While many disciplines manage design complexity with well-established digital tools, digital transformation of the certification process remains in the early stages of implementation. Models are often used to provide explicit structures to facilitate digital transformation. While several modeling approaches have been applied to regulatory documentation, a gap remains for an established list of requirements for developing effective models in the context of digital transformation. This paper proposes a list of requirements using a requirements elicitation framework adapted from the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) Needs and Requirements Manual. The adapted research methodology includes problem identification, needs assessment, and requirements development processes. The resulting requirements are validated against needs statements and verified against selected INCOSE requirement statement criteria. Four requirements are selected for a detailed feasibility assessment, which compares the efficacy of process mapping, Unified Modeling Language (UML), and ontological modeling methods to realize the requirements.