IncQuery Labs

Teams building aircraft, vehicles, medical devices and other safety-critical products work with many tools from different vendors, and the data rarely moves cleanly between them. IncQuery Labs builds software to fix that. The company describes the usual result as a dual lock-in: engineering data trapped in silos, and the custom add-ons written to bridge them trapped inside particular vendor ecosystems. Its stated goal is to turn copy-paste and data re-entry into automated, push-button exchange with full traceability.

The problem with document-centric engineering

According to the company, organizations still depend on manual, error-prone techniques because tool interfaces are closed. Writing plug-ins for each tool is expensive to build and maintain, and fragmentation stops key stakeholders from keeping an overview. IncQuery Labs says it customizes existing tools to fit real needs and makes the surrounding ecosystems cooperate, moving data between application and product lifecycle management, model-based systems engineering and detailed design tools.

What the company has built

• IncQuery Integrator, the framework that links engineering tools and their data across vendor ecosystems.
• AUTOSAR-UML Bridge, a connector for automotive engineering workflows that is built on the framework above.
• Model quality reporting, stand-alone, DevOps-ready applications that produce reports based on standard and custom rules.
• An add-on for MagicDraw and Cameo Systems Modeler, which lets users run model queries locally.
• A data lake application, pitched as a scalable enterprise system that gathers scattered engineering records into a single repository.

Built for different roles

The IncQuery Suite is aimed at several people in the engineering process. Systems and domain engineers who use SysML and domain tools such as ECAD and simulation face inconsistencies between models that must be synchronized by hand. Quality assurance engineers collect validation data from many tools, which makes complete reports slow to compile. Digital engineering analysts work with dashboards but often need help from requirement engineers to understand how a product has developed.

Open architecture and research

The company says it builds open architectures that are easy to maintain, contributes to open-source ecosystems and works openly with each customer. It cites more than fifteen years of research and development, and its publications cover natural language processing for information retrieval in model-based engineering, verification of executable SysML models and the Lowcomote research project.