Article Accepted in IEEE Transactions on Computers

Anna Minaeva, who recently received her PhD degree, just had a journal article entitled “Control Performance Optimization for Application Integration on Automotive Architectures” accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Computers. This article is the result of a HiPEAC collaboration grant that Anna was awarded back in 2016 to visit the group of Samarjit Chakraborty at TU Munich. I am very happy to see that this grant resulted in a joint publication in a prestigious journal and hope to collaborate with Samarjit again in the future.

The article addresses the problem of generating a time-triggered schedule for a number of independently developed automotive applications on a number of shared resources, such that their control performance only suffers minimal degradation. The three main contributions are: 1) a constraint programming model that solves the problem optimally, exploiting properties of the problem to reduce the computation time; 2) a fast heuristic called Flexi that only has a minor impact on the optimality of the solution; and 3) an experimental evaluation of the scalability and efficiency of the proposed approaches on a case study, in addition to several synthetic datasets. The results show that the heuristic provides a solution on average 5 times faster, finding a feasible solution in 31% more problem instances than the optimal approach within a time limit, while only sacrificing 0.5% of the control performance quality for the largest dataset.

Four Projects Granted to Fight the Complexity of Cyber-Physical Systems

During the past two years, I have been involved with setting up the Partnership Program Mastering Complexity (MasCot), funded NWO Domain Applied and Engineering Sciences together with ESI (TNO). After a long process of defining the key topics, writing the call, and aligning with applicants, four innovative research projects have finally been granted, allocating three million euros to research on software restructuring, testing, scheduling and design of cyber-physical systems. Congratulations to Andy Pimentel, Twan Basten, Jan Tretmans, Eelco Visser, and their collaborators for the accepted projects. I am looking forward to seeing the results!

The full story is available on the ESI website.