Formal Structures in Systems Ontology towards Air Traffic Management Architectures

Driven by the need for a new aviation system architecture that can accommodate autonomy and its associated rapidly emerging technologies, NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU APL) have been collaborating on a novel approach to system engineering that combines the mathematics of category theory with the philosophy of ontology. From the summer of 2024 through the summer of 2025 a group of NASA interns worked alongside NASA LaRC and JHU APL to refine the nascent approach. In this paper, the authors establish a basic framework for describing fundamental aspects of engineered systems, and for encoding that information into rigorous mathematical constructions that can be used for computations. This paper should serve as a starting point for advancing the ideas coming out of the collaboration between NASA LaRC and JHU APL, and putting them into practice.