Breaking News – AS6969™
13 June 2018 – SAE International has published AS6969™ – Data Dictionary for Quantities Used in Cyber Physical Systems. This new technical standard provides a set of mathematical definitions for state quantities and measurements used in the command and control of manned and unmanned vehicles, weapons, sensors and other cyber physical devices. AS6969™ is intended for use by system architects and data modelers while remaining agnostic to the choice of modeling language and model structure.
SAE’s data dictionary methodology unlocks the system engineering understanding of state quantities and measurements from the tooling and structural decisions of the system architect, allowing systems with dissimilar data modeling strategies to interoperate.
AS6969™ is intended to be the basis of a Family of Dictionaries that will provide industry definitions for multiple cyber physical domains. Benefits of AS6969™ include:
- A library of mathematically coherent and industry-reviewed definitions that saves system architects and software engineers time and reduce errors in data model projects
- The means to equate the semantics of a named element in one model with the semantics of a named element in another via their UUID, thus saving time and reducing errors in model-to-model integration
- The AS6969™ Family of Dictionaries does not constrain the choice of modeling language or modeling tool, or the structure of the model. Nor does it constrain the naming of types and properties in the model
- Users can extend the AS6969™ Family of Dictionaries while maintaining mathematical coherence.
SAE AS6969™ provides a key resource in the industry’s drive toward ‘Level-3 Maturity’ of model-based engineering standards for cyber physical systems, in which multiple domain model standards can be integrated into a single architecture using reusable and interoperable model packages and common information exchange formats.
Rationale
The data dictionary provides definitions for quantities commonly used in the command and control of cyber physical systems. The data dictionary also provides a structure that may be extended to define quantities that are empirical to a specialist domain or an individual system.
The National Science Foundation defines a cyber physical system as an engineered system that is built from, and depends upon, the seamless integration of computational algorithms and physical components. The term encompasses intelligent vehicles and devices, including robotic and autonomous systems. Cyber physical systems process and exchange state information across data links and networks about real-world entities. The semantics of this state information is typically defined by a data model and an associated data dictionary. Cyber physical systems and resources that share a common data model and data dictionary, therefore, exhibit semantic and conceptual interoperability and are more quickly integrated.
In a data model, state information is expressed by the values of properties that are owned by real-world entities. Properties whose values have numerical magnitude are categorized as quantities. Properties whose values do not have numerical magnitude are categorized as nominal properties.