Year: 2026

A Decade at TNO-ESI: My Journey to Principal Scientist at TNO

Posted on by Benny Akesson

Ten years after joining TNO-ESI, I am proud to announce that I have been promoted to Principal Scientist for Model-based System Performance Engineering.

A Principal Scientist at TNO is a senior scientific leader who combines deep expertise with the ability to shape research directions and drive impact. They act as a bridge between science, industry, and strategic partners, ensuring that cutting-edge research is translated into real-world solutions. Principal Scientists are internationally recognized in their field, lead complex and high-impact research programs, and contribute to TNO’s long-term scientific and strategic agenda. In addition, they serve as role models within the organization, mentoring colleagues, inspiring others, and helping develop the next generation of scientists.

My positioning for the role built on a combination of three key pillars: (1) fundamental research, enabled by my appointment as Endowed Professor at the University of Amsterdam; (2) applied research at TNO-ESI in collaboration with industry partners such as Thales, Philips, and ASML; and (3) science management, through my roles as TNO-ESI Science Lead and Science and Technology Manager at unit ICT, Strategy & Policy (ISP). Through this combination, I have developed a strong overview of the innovation chain across technological readiness levels, as well as a clear understanding of how science connects with market and operations. This has enabled me to shape scientific programs and connect academia, research organizations, and industry within my field and beyond.

I am grateful for the recognition expressed in the announcement on the ESI website and look forward to continue my work in this role. Lastly, I would like to take this opportunity to thank past and present peers, managers, and directors that supported me during my journey and believed in me, even when I doubted.

Excited to share that our NWO OTP project DESIRE has been accepted!

Posted on by Benny Akesson

Together with ASML, University of Amsterdam, Leiden University, and TNO-ESI, we are starting a new research project on design-space exploration for complex distributed cyber-physical systems. Thank you ASML and TNO-ESI for contributing to the project, and to Philips, Canon Production Printing, Thales, Vanderlande, Eindhoven University of Technology, and University of Twente for joining the user committee.

Design-space Exploration for Complex Distributed Cyber-Physical Systems (DESIRE) builds on our earlier work in DSE 2.0, extending it toward an advanced holistic and automated approach to exploring alternative hardware platforms, software changes, and mappings — helping engineers answer critical what-if questions on performance and cost in increasingly complex systems. In particular, we will focus on:
1) Capturing realistic system behavior from traces while scaling to industrial systems with partial observability and complex environments
2) Bridging software and hardware characterization to enable model-based exploration of performance across heterogeneous platforms.
3) Handling extremely large, heterogeneous, multi-objective design spaces.

At the same time, it’s great to see how earlier results are already being picked up, matured, and experimented with in practice by TNO-ESI and ASML, closing the loop between academic research and industrial impact.

Looking forward to this next step in the collaboration!

The announcement of the grant from NWO is available here.

Reflections on a PhD Defense: Real-Time Guarantees in the Edge–Cloud Continuum

Posted on by Benny Akesson

Today, I served on the PhD committee of Nasim Samimi, who defended her dissertation titled “Edge-Cloud-Assisted Real-Time Cyber-Physical Systems.” This work addresses the challenge of providing predictable real-time guarantees for cyber-physical systems deployed across the edge–cloud continuum. As CPS increasingly rely on distributed, shared, and dynamic infrastructures, traditional design-time schedulability analysis becomes insufficient. The dissertation proposes a set of online admission control, scheduling, and orchestration techniques that provide per-job deadline guarantees and controlled service degradation under bursty workloads. The main contributions span formal job-level admission control for multicore servers, weakly-hard real-time guarantees using (M,K)-firmness, and practical deployment mechanisms for real-time workloads in Kubernetes-based edge–cloud platforms. Together, these contributions aim to bridge the gap between real-time theory and modern cloud-native practice.

I very much enjoyed reading this dissertation, as it tackles an important problem at the intersection of real-time systems, cyber-physical systems, and edge–cloud computing. I particularly appreciate the combination of solid theoretical foundations in the early chapters with increasingly practical contributions in the later chapters. A great example of this is the KubeDeadline technology, which extends Kubernetes to schedule Linux containers according to the well-known SCHED_DEADLINE policy and guarantee them a portion of CPU bandwidth with bounded latency. This work successfully translates classic real-time scheduling concepts into modern edge-cloud software architectures.

The defense went well, and shortly after the beadle pronounced the end of the defense (“Hora est!”), Nasim became Dr. Samimi. Congratulations on this achievement! It was a pleasure to serve on this committee, and I wish Nasim all the best in her future career.

Literature Study on Performance Prediction

Posted on by Benny Akesson

Today, Jan Przystal presented his literature study Performance Prediction for Microservice-Based Cyber-Physical Systems: A Cross-Domain Literature Review. The study reviews existing methods for predicting performance in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) during the early design phase. It focuses on how resource contention, caused by shared hardware such as caches, memory, and I/O, leads to performance degradation, and why this makes Design Space Exploration (DSE) challenging for complex distributed CPS. The study surveys simulation-based approaches, profiling techniques, and interference prediction methods originating from both CPS and cloud computing, and evaluates their suitability for fast and scalable performance estimation. It concludes that while current methods can provide useful approximations, none fully meet the need for a quick, accurate, and scalable prediction approach for large CPS design spaces, highlighting the need for further research in this area. These are challenges that Jan will address during his master project, building on our earlier work with Bruno Dzikowski in this area.

It was nice to see that there was broad interest in Jan’s presentation not only from the performance team at TNO-ESI, but also among some of its industry partners, as well as experts in performance prediction from University of Amsterdam, Eindhoven University of Technology, and University of Twente. That certainly made the Q&A session afterwards spicier, although Jan confidently answered most of the questions.  Congratulations Jan on work well done!

NWO Grants Funding for iCARe Project

Posted on by Benny Akesson

I am pleased to announce that the iCARe project (“Integrated indulgent Control Architecture design”) has been officially granted by NWO under the NXTGEN Hightech programme. The project brings together leading academic and industrial partners to rethink how high‑tech motion systems, such as those used in semiconductor manufacturing, are designed and optimized. With a total project budget of €3.3 million, iCARe aims to develop a radically new integrated control architecture that jointly considers servo control, computational hardware, and power electronics. This approach will enable next‑generation machines to achieve unprecedented accuracy and throughput while remaining cost‑effective, an essential step for future semiconductor technologies.

I will contribute to this project in my role as part-time professor at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). Together with partners from TU/e and ASML, UvA researchers (me, Andy Pimentel, and a PhD student) will develop innovative computational platform architectures, including new scheduling strategies and automated design‑space‑exploration tools that directly link computing performance to control‑system quality. This contribution is vital for enabling high‑precision control at extreme speeds and for integrating computing considerations into the heart of system‑engineering decisions. The project spans six years and will support collaborative research across multiple disciplines.

Congratulations to the iCARE consortium for securing this competitive funding and we look forward to working with you on this next step forward in high‑tech system design.

Read more in the official announcement from NWO or the news at University of Amsterdam.

Call for Special Session Proposals – ESWEEK 2026

Posted on by Benny Akesson

As Special Session Co-chair it is my pleasure to invite Special Session proposals for ESWEEK 2026, the premier event bringing together the embedded systems, software, and cyber-physical systems communities.

Special Sessions are a great opportunity to:
✅ Highlight emerging research directions
✅ Bring together interdisciplinary communities
✅ Foster discussion on timely and impactful topics

We welcome proposals from academia and industry covering innovative, forward-looking, and cross-cutting themes.

📌 Learn more and submit your proposal:
👉 https://esweek.org/call-for-special-session-proposals/
🌐 General information: https://esweek.org

If you are passionate about shaping the technical program of ESWEEK and sparking vibrant discussions, we strongly encourage you to submit a proposal!