Student Name: Manuel J. Diaz

Advisor: Dr. Dimitri Mavris

Milestone: PhD Thesis Final Examination (Defense)

Degree Program: Aerospace Engineering

Title: An Approach to Developing Ontology-Based Epistemic Infrastructure for Early-Phase Architecting of Space Exploration Campaigns

Abstract: NASA's Artemis Program, an ambitious space exploration campaign (SEC) to explore the Moon and Mars, is expected to grow to over 50 highly-coupled major acquisitions. Yet for the past 35 years, NASA's acquisition practices have been designated "high-risk" by the GAO due to chronic cost overruns and schedule delays. A root cause analysis traces these outcomes to epistemic shortfalls in early-phase architecting: tacitness, ambiguity, manual data transfers, and inconsistencies in how architectural knowledge is represented, exchanged, and verified. To address these shortfalls, this dissertation introduces ontologies and semantic web technologies into early-phase campaign architecting to develop ontology-based epistemic infrastructure. A tailored methodology, SEC Ontology Development Methodology (SECODM), was formulated. Following it, a layered ontology ecosystem, SECO, was developed along with minimum viable infrastructure for development, verification, and deployment. An evaluation framework based on elegant systems theory was developed to assess these contributions. Three case studies demonstrated that the ontology and infrastructure address the identified root causes through formal knowledge representation, machine-readable interoperability, and automated consistency verification.

Date and time: 2026-05-04, 1pm ET

Location: CoVE

Committee:
Dr. Dimitri Mavris (advisor), School of Aerospace Engineering
Prof. Daniel Scrage, School of Aerospace Engineering
Prof. Thomas Gonzalez Roberts, School of Aerospace Engineering
Dr. Bradford Robertson, School of Aerospace Engineering
Dr. Michael Balchanos, School of Aerospace Engineering
Dr. Stephen Edwards, NASA MSFC