Month: April 2025

Highlights from TNO-ESI at ICT.OPEN 2025

Posted on by bennyakesson

NWO ICT.OPEN 2025 took place in the Jaarbeurs in Utrecht on April 15 and 16. In retrospect, I think it was the best ICT.OPEN I have visited so far. It was also the most popular edition in modern times, with over 500 registered participants and another 200 people wanting to register, but who could not be accommodated. It was particularly nice to see that systems research is now well represented at the conference again, thanks to the CompSys community and organizations like TNO. TNO was highly visible at the event this year with representation from several research groups within the unit ICT, Strategy and Policy. Below are some highlights focusing on the involvement from my dear group TNO-ESI:

  • Keynote: I gave a keynote titled “Engineering the Future: Addressing System Complexity in High-Tech Equipment”, which described the challenge of increasing system complexity in high-tech equipment and how TNO-ESI addresses this challenge in an open innovation ecosystem by developing engineering methodologies based on model-based engineering, formal methods, and artificial intelligence. Two examples were given of such methodologies, ComMA and Renaissance, highlighting the collaborations in the innovation chain and describing the industry impact.  Immediately after the keynote, I also participated in an NWO Panel session about partnerships in ICT Research, where challenges and best practices for research collaborations were discussed among the panelists and with the audience.
  • Mastering Complexity Track: Rosilde Corvino and Nan Yang co-chaired the track “Mastering Complexity for Cyber-Physical Systems”, which featured three presentations: one invited industry talk and two peer-reviewed research contributions. The invited presentation was delivered by Alok Lele, Project Manager at ASML Software Research. He shared insightful perspectives on leveraging Generative AI to modernize the software of ASML systems. His concept of continuous and iterative micro-modernization sparked an engaging discussion among the audience. In addition, PhD candidates Faezeh Sadat Saadatmand and Ameneh Naghdi Pour presented their research on design-space exploration and system diagnosis, respectively. The session was interactive and discussed emerging methodologies and challenges in managing complexity in cyber-physical systems.
  • Research results: Emile van Gerwen and Micha Lipplaa demonstrated how using chain-of-thought prompting with a Large Language Model (LLM) in combination with semantic search helps Philips Healthcare in their risk assessment of incoming complaints. Their work concluded that compared to both keyword search and semantic search without an LLM knowledge extraction pre-processing step, a combined approach clearly shows the best results.

I would like to thank all organizers for a lovely event, particularly the Program Co-chairs Mitra Nasri and Vadim Zaytsev for putting together a fantastic program.

MOANA-CBS Milestone at Thales

Posted on by bennyakesson

It is a fantastic feeling when research results in industry impact! We recently celebrated that our course Modelling and Analysis of Component-based Systems (MOANA-CBS) was given for the 10th time at Thales. We celebrated this milestone with an appropriately themed cake. In total, about 100 systems and software engineers have now been trained in specification and verification of software interfaces using Eclipse CommaSuite. Hats of to our Thales trainers, Jeroen Kouwer and Mark Horsthuis, who are giving the trainings. The word on the street is that seats for the course are still filling up quickly and that more instances of the course are to be expected in the future.

It is not only engineers at Thales that benefit from MOANA-CBS. We also made an academic version of the course that focuses on modelling and verification of software interfaces using Petri nets, allowing students to learn some basics of model-based engineering using examples from the world of systems and software engineering. This material is given as a part of my course Model-based Design of Cyber-physical Systems, which is given to approximately 80 software engineers at University of Amsterdam every year. By now, more than 300 students have learned from this material.

The MOANA-CBS course is a result from the DYNAMICS project, a public-private collaboration between Thales and TNO-ESI that ran between 2019-2021. For more information about the the project and a demo, please read more here.

Paper on Energy Labeling of Digital Services Accepted at CCGRID 2025

Posted on by bennyakesson

Congratulations to Saeedeh Baneshi for having her paper, “Empowering Sustainability: Energy Labeling of Digital Services Using Simulation” accepted at the 25th IEEE International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud, and Internet Computing (CCGRID).

This work addresses the challenge of creating awareness about the energy consumption of digital services distributed across the compute continuum in an understandable and actionable way. The paper proposes the first operational energy labeling method for digital services in this context. This approach enables stakeholders—including cloud and network providers, application developers, researchers, and end-users of digital services—to better understand and improve the energy efficiency of their applications. Focusing on a video surveillance application and utilizing the enhanced iFogSim framework, the paper proposes an energy labeling scheme and demonstrates its merits through extensive scenario analysis and simulation. It also discusses how this approach can help reduce energy consumption and/or improve performance, without modifying the application’s functional parameters or system architecture.

Congratulations on the acceptance of your paper, Saeedeh. Enjoy the conference in Tromsø, Norway!