Bringing Systems Engineering Models to Large Language Models: An Integration of OPM with an LLM for Design Assistants

Although showing remarkable zero-shot and few-shot capabilities across a wide variety of tasks, Large Language Models (LLMs) are still not mature enough for off-the-shelf use in engineering design tasks. Organizations implementing model-based systems engineering practices into their product development processes can leverage on ontologies, models, and procedures to enhance LLMs applied to engineering design tasks. We present a methodology to integrate an Object-Process Methodology model of a space system into an LLMbased spacecraft design assistant and show a performance improvement, as compared to a conventional LLM. The benchmark is evaluated through subjective expert-assessed and an objective cosine-similarity-based criteria. The results motivate additional efforts in integrating Model-Based Systems Engineering practice into LLMs as means to improve their performance and reduce shortcomings such as hallucinations and black-box, untraceable behavior.