Operation of a Concurrent Design Facility for university projects

Concurrent Design is a part of the systems engineering process, which has been widely adopted in space mission design. This paper describes the setting up a facility in a university and will try to answer a question of where the Concurrent Design Facility (CDF) concept can fit into education. Hardware setup, software approaches and knowledge management procedures are discussed. The focus of this work was to create an Integrated Design Model (IDM) for nanosats and microsats. This IDM was used to design various space related projects including a Cubesat missions, suborbital plane and a space telescope. We also discuss how to utilize CDF concept after the design phase for validation and verification. CDF was also used for a number of multidisciplinary projects.