JPL's Foundry Furnace: Web-Based Concurrent Engineering for Formulation

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Innovation Foundry is an enterprise tasked with shepherding space mission concepts through the formulation lifecycle. It oversees a number of “virtual teams” for the various stages of formulation. Among these is Team X, which has had considerable success over its more than 20-year history. In a Team X study, domain experts (including engineers devoted to the various spacecraft subsystems) work concurrently and collaboratively over several days to arrive at a feasible point design with a reasonable cost estimate. They use a set of linked Excel workbooks, each developed and approved by a responsible “line organization” within JPL. This toolset has served Team X well over the years, and has evolved since its inception. At the same time, the Innovation Foundry’s portfolio of formulation teams has expanded, and so has the scope of the design challenges they face. The A-Team runs workshop-like architecture studies to focus science investigations, generate mission concepts, assess feasibility, and explore trade spaces. Team Xc performs rapid point design in the style of Team X, but for CubeSats and small spacecraft, using a different toolset. Proposal teams further mature concepts to the point where they can be proposed. Recognizing the importance of trade space modeling combined with new IT services for providing and integrating data, JPL is developing the Foundry Furnace web-based software infrastructure. It will support A-Team, Team Xc, and Team X, providing study management, a catalog of hardware components, a library of re-usable analyses, and a design environment. It is a modernization of JPL’s concurrent engineering infrastructure, embracing the core concepts of Model-Based Systems Engineering, and built with modern software design philosophies.