This article describes Department of Defense (DoD) Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC) efforts leading to and supporting the DoD Digital Engineering (DE) initiative. Topics include the SERC’s initial collaboration with Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) in 2013 as well as ongoing SERC DE research. The article also identifies future research needed to continue to develop the DE ecosystem for system of systems acquisition, which will require rapidly changing mission strategies to address ever-evolving threats.

This article discusses ongoing research investigating the feasibility of supporting an interoperability and integration framework to enable the digital thread, or an authoritative source of truth with current technology. The question that initiated this exploratory research was, “Is there current technology that can enable cross-domain digital artifact data sharing needed for the digital thread?” A thorough review and investigation of current state-of-the-art model-based systems engineering was performed by reviewing literature and performing multiple site visits and interviews with organizations at the forefront of digital engineering. After this initial investigation and review, a Semantic Web-enabled framework that would allow data in the thread to be captured, stored, transferred, checked for completeness and consistency, and changed under revision change control management began to be formed. This framework has gone through revisions. This paper reflects the most current demonstration of the framework and its capability of acquiring digital data, and parsing and querying the data using Semantic Web technology to generate a decision table that allows the decision data to be visualized. The article concludes with future demonstrations of the framework to further advance toward a framework that can enable a digital thread in practice.