MBSE Framework for Developing Data-Driven Passenger Services in Aircraft Cabins

The aircraft cabin plays a crucial role in airline differentiation strategies, particularly when introducing novel business and operational processes. These processes aim to enhance passenger experience during flight and to improve cabin crew efficiency in order to reduce workload and to ensure continued growth of airline revenue. Digitalization and extensive exchange of information across the entire aircraft transport system have emerged as key enablers for these processes. The development of aircraft and aircraft systems implementing these processes is characterized by a multi-level development process. Various development levels are considered to initially identify the functions of an aircraft in the air transport system, refine its systems and break them down into their components until a level of detail is reached that allows the implementation of the component functions. In addition to the high complexity, a major challenge in this development is to ensure traceability and consistency across the various development levels. Consequently, Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) is increasingly applied in aviation to address these challenges. While numerous MBSE frameworks and methodologies exist, they often overlook the specific requirements of aviation’s multi-level development process. Hence, this paper introduces an MBSE framework tailored to the development of novel business and operational processes, along with their corresponding aircraft systems, across multiple development levels. The framework ensures seamless model-based information flow across all levels by providing detailed process activities at each development stage and incorporating aviation-specific regulatory and operational considerations. Additionally, given the digitalized nature of the processes and the resulting interconnected systems, specific views are proposed at each development level to capture communication network designs and relevant cybersecurity information.