A Digital Engineering Factory for Students

In this paper, the authors outline the development of the Digital Engineering Factory (DEF), a digital engineering environment under development at the University of Arizona (UA) to support engineering students. The DEF uses a “hub-and-spoke” approach to enable the integration of data from multiple tools. The hub comprises Violet, which uses REST APIs to integrate data into a single database, and OML Rosetta, which leverages semantic web technologies to structure the data and add value through inference, validation, and querying. The UA Ontology Stack has been developed to support the graph data structure. An example student-centric use case is described, and the outcomes are presented and discussed. Further work will focus on the continued development and automation of the DEF, including the UA Ontology Stack and the integration of other engineering tools.