Transforming systems engineering through integrating modeling and simulation and the digital thread

This chapter introduces the Digital Engineering Framework for Integration and Interoperability (DEFII) as a methodological foundation for the use of ontologies and graph data structures in a digital engineering context. DEFII leverages enabling technologies to support modeling and simulation in different engineering disciplines and provides an approach for integrating analysis models and simulations results into a coherent digital thread that crosses disciplines at different levels of abstraction. The chapter presents a simple catapult use case and a python-based implementation of the methodology to provide further details of how the methodology can work in a domain-specific example.