nForge

A system engineering workbench for the modeling and analysis of all your system data - with a scalable database, integrated visualization and a powerful API

nForge: System Engineering Workbench

nForge is a generalized data repository, with layered, scalable, customizable tool architecture. nForge includes a set of facilities to keep multiple data sources and models complete and consistent with each other.  These facilities enable:

• Seamless import/export with popular, widely used tools
• Proven scalability from supporting infrastructure for distributed teams with large and diverse data sets
• Unifying semantics, represented by a simple yet powerful data model, onto which multiple models can be mapped

These facilities have been demonstrated to implement an "integrated multi-view" vastly improving current ad-hoc practices.

nForge was developed in partnership with Lockheed Martin Aeronautics, and funded by the U.S. Air Force. nForge was tested and demonstrated using a sanitized subset of a major DoD Program’s dataset. This demonstration included importing and navigating the C++ code base; importing, constructing and navigating multiple models of: messaging, call graphs, multi-threading, hardware-to-software allocation, execution time test results, schedulability analysis, end-to-end system thread analysis, interactive allocation and re-allocation of software to hardware, studying its impacts, quantitative modeling and incorporation of memory cache interference when using modern multi-core architectures and more.

Enhanced Modeling

nForge enhanced modeling improves the system development and sustainment operations by

• capturing and enforcing constraints and rules within models and datasets
• capturing and enforcing consistency of overlapping concepts across models and datasets using rules
• presenting one unifying reality

Programmable Adapters

nForge maintains its own Graph model, onto which multiple datasets and models are mapped via adapters. Adapters have been deployed for C++ source code, Microsoft Excel sheets, XML format files, as well as nVision, nTrace and nLoad datasets. Experimental adapters for UML, SysML and AADL and corresponding tools exist, and we are seeking motivated customer funding. Custom adapters can be created using nForge API.

Queries and Visualization

nForge includes an Application Programming Interface (API) using which powerful custom queries and visualizations can be created. nForge API can be programmed in Java, Javascript, Groovy, Python, or nForge Language. In addition, the nForge API makes the entire Apache Gremlin graph traversal language available, using which highly scalable graphs can be created, manipulated and visualized.

Interactive visualization and navigation of system design and test data

The screen image below is representative of an "integrated view" created by parsing C++ source code, importing signal databases, lab test results, and allocation strategies. This data is still all maintained in separate Excel and XML files, but has been made highly navigable.