Month: April 2024

ESI Symposium 2024: A Showcase of Cutting-Edge Research in High-tech Equipment

Posted on by bennyakesson

I had a blast at the ESI Symposium in Veldhoven! It may have been the best ESI Symposium I have visited so far! It is great to see the innovation chain for Dutch high-tech equipment come together and share challenges, exciting new research results, as well as success stories from our implementation partners.

The Symposium also showcased the progress of our academic programs. The Mastering Complexity (MasCot) program, now a veteran at the ESI Symposium, contributes new engineering methodologies to help us manage increasing system complexity and develop next-gen high-tech equipment efficiently and cost-effectively through all development phases, from early architecting to implementation, testing, and evolution. As the program enters its fourth year, the current focus is on rounding off much of the research and transfer developed knowledge and proof-of-concepts to ESI and the industry partners.

The Symposium also introduced our recently started ZORRO project, which is set to change the way we handle system malfunctions in cyber-physical systems. With intelligent diagnostics, ZORRO is on a mission to significantly reduce downtime costs and enhance system reliability. Interested to learn more? Reach out or stay tuned to hear more as the research develops!

Mastering Complexity at ICT.Open

Posted on by bennyakesson

This week saw another edition of NWO ICT.OPEN, a yearly event that brings scientists from all ICT research disciplines and industries together to learn, share ideas, and network.

My colleague Rosilde Corvino and I from TNO-ESI chaired the Mastering Complexity for Cyber-Physical Systems track. This track was kicked off with a keynote about software architecture for strategic advantage, given by Erik Schepers, Chief Software Architect at Thales. Two presentations followed about using large language models to manage software legacy and task-oriented programming for the Internet of Things, respectively. Approximately 30 participants attended the track, highlighting its relevance and the keen interest in cyber-physical systems. The event also saw a few projects from ESI’s Mastering Complexity (MasCot) academic program, DSE2.0 and Software Restructuring, being present with posters.

Lastly, the poster “Models for Legacy Software Systems,” authored by ESI colleagues Joe Reynolds, Nan Yang, Rosilde Corvino, Anca-Maria Lichiardopol, and Joost van Zwam, won the best poster award at the ICT.Open conference. The work has been prized for its innovation, applicability, and clarity of presentation. Congratulations to the team for this achievement, and kudos to Joe Reynolds for his outstanding presentation, demo, and poster explanation.

Next Tuesday, it is time for the next event, the crown jewel of ESI, the ESI Symposium 2024. It is still possible to register for free. I hope to see you there!

Keynote on Managing Variability and Evolution in High-tech Equipment at FOSD Meeting 2024

Posted on by bennyakesson

I had the distinct honor of opening this year’s Meeting on Feature-Oriented Software Development (FOSD Meeting) with a keynote titled “Managing Variability and Evolution in High-tech Equipment”. FOSD Meeting is a yearly informal meeting to bring together the community of researchers working on feature-oriented software development. This year, the event was hosted by TU/e between April 9 – 12.

The keynote covered complexity trends in the high-tech equipment domain, ESI and its role in the high-tech innovation eco-system, and two examples of how variability and evolution were tackled using model-based methodologies at the level of the software architecture in our projects with Thales. The keynote was appreciated by the organizers of the event and the group of 35 participants, mostly from (German) universities but also from ESI’s international applied research partner DLR.

Reflecting on my experience, I was pleasantly surprised at the broad expertise in this community, which covered modelling, software engineering, and performance and I wished I could have stayed around to enjoy the rest of the event. I am happy to see that the keynote triggered some concrete follow ups that can help us link members of this academic community to research in the high-tech equipment ecosystem.

PhD Defense on Governance of Complex Cyber-infrastructure

Posted on by bennyakesson

Today, I chaired a PhD committee at the University of Amsterdam. The PhD candidate Mostafa Mohajeri Parizi defended his dissertation “An Agent-based Approach to the Governance of Complex Cyber-Infrastructures”. The dissertation explores the impact of digitization on society and the need for engineering approaches to ensure that digital systems comply with regulations. Mostafa did his PhD research in the Complex Cyber-Infrastructure (CCI) group under the supervision of TNO colleague Tom van Engers (Principal Scientist ISP DS). The work centers on the use of computational agents and norms to develop tools and methodologies for governing socio-technical systems. The study introduces ASC2, an agent-based programming framework built on the belief-desire-intention model, alongside a scalable multi-agent system environment. It emphasizes the integration of mainstream software development tools into agent-based programming and enhances transparency and decision-making in agents by incorporating context-dependent preferences. Furthermore, the dissertation proposes a modular architecture for integrating norms into multi-agent systems, allowing for the flexible adoption and reasoning of norms without compromising agent autonomy. This is illustrated through two case studies demonstrating the framework’s application in coordinating agent actions and aligning them with encoded laws. The research highlights the potential of agent and norm models in improving the design and policy-making of digital infrastructures.

Mostafa did a good job presenting and defending his work and the committee were impressed by the breadth of the research. We hope the newly minted Dr. Mohajeri Parizi enjoyed the ceremony and the celebration with his friends and family and wish him all the best of luck in his future career.