29.01.2018 – Athens, Greece
We are glad to announce that the ACOSIM project related to the application of co-simulation to support test and operations, was awarded to EMTECH Space P.C. consortium by ESA/ESTEC. EMTECH is the prime contractor and TWT GmbH, Thales Alenia Space Italia (TAS-I) and the Aarhus University (Denmark) will act as sub-contractors. The Kick-off meeting took place on the 29th of January. The team is now eager to conduct research on co-simulation techniques to be used in the space domain for Verification & Validation (V&V) activities.
Mr. Nikolaos Livanos, EMTECH’s Managing Director made the following statement: “We greatly appreciate ESA’s confidence in our company to lead this major project and have the opportunity to participate in such a key-study for space simulations. We are also very glad to continue our collaboration with TAS-I, a space domain European Large System Integrator, also sub-contractor in a successful ESA study for THOR mission. It is also an honor to have TWT, a premium development partner with more than 30 years of background in the automotive industry, as a key subcontractor in the activity. Last but not least, we are pleased to also have the Aarhus University in the team, providing the consortium with the solid scientific background required. We truly believe that the presented opportunity will solidify our business relationships with ESTEC, TWT, TASI and Aarhus University and will strengthen our path towards business growth in space simulations engineering.”
EMTECH has been involved in co-simulation R&D for Space Engineering, since 2014. The result of these activities is SimBridge; a space technology that allows SMP2 simulators to be interfaced with external COTS tools. EMTECH is engaged on research and development for high technology products and services related to space software engineering, with focus on systems’ simulation. Our mission is to contribute to the space simulation domain and our belief is that a concrete methodology that enables co-simulation, will leverage complex Model Driven Architecture based developments, towards optimized and economically efficient solutions.
In this direction, co-simulation approaches, already applied in other industries, such as the FMI standard, sparked interest within the space domain, as a solution to face certain challenges. These challenges include, but are not limited to: data exchange, timing and synchronization, communication/interfacing and tools coupling. In this effort, the early phases of the space systems’ development could not be ignored, as it is expected that in order to truly achieve co-simulation, the above challenges have to be taken into account while setting the requirements and performing the architectural design of the system models.
Therefore, co-simulation in the space domain is an inevitable evolution of the existing space simulation facilities and the Model Based System Engineering (MBSE) approaches, imposed by the upcoming needs in aerospace simulation industry. Thus, the main target of the ACOSIM project is the definition of a new Verification & Validation methodology that will enable the use of co-simulation in the Space Simulation Facilities (FES, SVF, TOMS). EMTECH is now looking forward for the implementation and the outcome of this very promising activity.
