Category: ESI

Final MasCot Program Day Highlights Results, Lessons Learned, and Future Collaborations

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I had a fantastic time hosting the fourth Mastering Complexity (MasCot) Program Day on October 9 at TU Delft. MasCot, a €3M academic program co-funded by TNO-ESI and NWO, addresses the pressing need for new advanced engineering methodologies through four projects covering essential topics, such as design space exploration during early system design, scheduling, verification, and restructuring of evolving software.

The day started with an update from the four academic projects in the program, focusing on updates and new results from the last year. It was interesting to hear a mix of positive results, e.g. new scheduling methods that outperform previous approaches, as well as negative results, a counter-example that demonstrated that further attempts at proving a particular theory were not worthwhile.

In the afternoon, TNO-ESI and industry partners from the projects shared their user stories, in which they reflected on the value of the program and the knowledge and proof-of-concept implementations developed in it. The user stories were positive and included examples of planned and ongoing technology transfer from the projects.

There were also breakout sessions where TNO-ESI, academic staff, industry representatives, and PhD students separately discussed what went well during the organization and execution of the program, and what should be done differently in the future. This feedback will be consolidated in a document describing the lessons learned from the MasCot Program, which will be used as a basis to refining the method for academic collaborations at TNO-ESI. It was clear from the feedback from all groups that everyone appreciated the program and how TNO-ESI brought academia and industry together to solve relevant problems. A main challenge for the future is to better align stakeholders from industry and academia and their different goals, environments, and timelines.

The day program was concluded with an interactive session, structured around our PMCs, where participants worked together to identify interesting research challenges and hot research topics for future academic collaborations. What stood out in terms of challenges was a clear need to address testing and integration challenges, also in the context of microservices. When looking at hot research topics and technological opportunities … you guessed it … safe, explainable, responsible, … , AI for Systems Engineering!

The day concluded with a social program at Stadsbrouwerij De Koperen Kat with a short tour given by the owner and a BBQ buffet with beer tasting. That concluded the fourth, and last MasCot Program Day.

 

Call for Papers: Special Issue on Model-Driven System-Performance Engineering for CPS

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I’m honored to serve as Guest Editor for a special issue of IET Cyber-Physical Systems: Theory and Applications focused on Model-Driven System-Performance Engineering for CPS. This issue is a collaboration with Twan Basten (Eindhoven University of Technology), Arvind Easwaran (Nanyang Technological University), and Marilyn Wolf (University of Nebraska-Lincoln).

We invite submissions from both academia and industry across various application domains. If you’re working in this area, consider contributing your research! The submission deadline is November 1, 2024. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions!

Model-Driven System-Performance Engineering for CPS

Submission deadline: Friday, 1 November 2024
Expected Publication Month: June 2025

System performance refers to the amount of useful work done by a system within predefined quality constraints. System performance often brings the competitive advantage for cyber-physical systems in domains like autonomous driving, chip manufacturing and production systems in general, healthcare, the smart grid, precision agriculture, and so on. To meet market demands for product and system quality, system customization, and a low total cost of ownership, systems need to meet ever more ambitious targets relating to system performance. Performance is a cross-cutting system-level concern, with intricate relations to other system-level concerns like quality, cost, energy efficiency, security, reliability, and customizability. Model-driven system-performance engineering (MD-SysPE) for CPS is essential to improve time-to-quality and the cost-performance ratio of complex systems.

This special issue invites any contributions in model-driven system-performance engineering for CPS that are of interest to the academic and industrial CPS community at large. Original research papers, industrial applications and case studies, and surveys on relevant topics are welcome.

Topics for this call for papers include but are not restricted to:

  • Multi-domain modelling, analysis, and optimization of performance aspects
  • Performance views in system architecture
  • Modelling and analysis of trade-offs with other system qualities
  • Modelling and analysis across abstraction levels
  • Design-space exploration methods
  • Synthesis methods targeting performance
  • Scheduling, control in relation to performance
  • Time-predictable (software) execution
  • Data-driven performance analysis and optimization
  • AI methods for performance analysis, optimization, diagnostics
  • Performance monitoring
  • Run-time adaptation and optimization
  • Performance debugging and diagnostics
  • Model learning for performance
  • Performance validation, verification, and testing

Software variability is as relevant as ever as a driver of complexity in high-tech equipment

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Earlier this week, TNO-ESI arranged a webinar with Jacob Krüger, Assistant Professor at Eindhoven University of Technology. In the presentation “Do We Still Need This? Managing Variability in Modern Software Systems” he presented his research on development and evolution of variant-rich software systems. The presentation explained how successful systems are often cloned to create new variants until managing the variability becomes too complex and expensive. It discussed the transition from cloning towards platform-based software architectures and compared the development costs for new features and new variants, respectively, for the two cases, based on empirical data from industry. These insights are valuable to inform decision-making about when adopting a platform-based approach is strategic. However, Jacob also made clear that moving to a platform-based approach introduces its own challenges, such as ensuring software comprehension and quality, analyzing variability, aligning software and hardware release schedules, and deprecation of variable features.

The webinar attracted an audience of approximately 40 people from TNO-ESI, ASML, Thales, Canon, Vanderlande, ThermoFisher, and Radboud University Nijmegen. This strongly suggests that variability is still a main concern both in systems and software engineering that affects all parts of system development, from early architecting to implementation, testing, and evolution. I was thrilled to see that there was a lively discussion with questions and remarks. In retrospect, I wish we would have reserved more time to keep the conversation going. If you would like to discuss your particular variability challenges or ideas with Jacob, feel free to contact him.

TNO-ESI looks forward to arranging more webinars with experts from our eco-system of academic and industry partners in the field of software and system engineering for high-tech equipment.

TNO-ESI and Academic Partners Deliver ASCI PhD Course on Design and Implementation of Real-time Systems

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The Netherlands boasts a world-leading high-tech manufacturing industry renowned for constructing distributed real-time systems of continuously growing complexity. These systems must meet stringent timing requirements to ensure the delivery of mission-critical functionalities. To create interest in the high-tech equipment domain and prepare PhD students in Computer Science to address its performance challenges, TNO-ESI has co-created and delivered a one-week PhD course Design and Implementation of Real-time Systems together with academic partners from Eindhoven University of Technology, University of Twente, and University of Amsterdam. The course is given in the context of the Advanced School for Computing and Imaging (ASCI), a Dutch research school for high-quality research and education in computer systems and imaging systems. ASCI encompasses almost all Dutch universities with computer-science departments. The main goals of ESI involvement in this course were to make participants aware of TNO and its role in society and industry and position it as a possible future employer, and creating awareness of TNO-ESIs vision and work in the area of system performance engineering.

The course is focused on providing an overview of selected timing-sensitive applications and the current research landscape on real-time systems and explaining the rationale behind considering real-time requirements in system software design. Through a series of lectures and hands-on labs, the course covers selected topics from scheduling algorithms, priority assignments, resource sharing, resource reservation, together with their implementation in real-time operating systems. It further discusses emerging challenges and practices in an industrial context, based on empirical surveys and experience from TNO-ESIs applied research on telemetry-based system performance engineering for purposes of performance optimization, verification, and diagnostics.

This first instance of the course was given at the Carlton President Hotel in Maarsen, outside Utrecht between June 10 – 14. 15 PhD students from universities all over the Netherlands researching a broad range of topics in computer science participated in the course. TNO-ESI was in the spotlight during the last day of the course. In the morning, I introduced the high-tech equipment domain and its complexity drivers and explained how new model-based engineering methodologies where needed to address them. Next, my colleague Bram van der Sanden presented our view on the field of System Performance Engineering, along with its focus areas and best practices. This was followed by two concrete examples from our system performance research: Kostas Triantafyllidis presented his work on performance analysis and diagnosis with ASML, followed by a presentation by me about performance verification and conformance checking in microservice systems based on our work with Thales.

The course was well-received by the participants and the contents were rated 8.7/10 in the evaluation. We very much enjoyed the experience of creating and delivering this course together with our academic partners. Thank you Kuan-Hsun Chen (leader of the initiative), Mitra Nasri, and Geoffrey Nelissen for the excellent collaboration in organizing this course. Thanks to Kay Heider and Christian Hakert for leading the hands-on exercises. We are also thankful to invited speakers Bram van der Sanden and Kostas Triantafyllidis.

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

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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

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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

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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.

The Journey from Offline to Online Conformance Checking for Microservice Applications

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Ricardo Andrade has successfully defended his master thesis “Real-Time Conformance Checking for Microservice Applications“. This thesis was done in the context of the ArchViews project together with Thales. The academic supervisor was ESI colleague and TU/e professor Johan Lukkien and the daily supervision at ESI was done by myself and Ben Pronk.

The thesis addresses the shift from monolithic architectures to microservice architectures in order to manage the complexities and dependencies that emerge as systems grow and incorporate new features. A significant gap identified in the management of microservice applications is the lack of effective conformance checking techniques that can verify whether the execution of microservices aligns with their specification. To address this, the thesis proposes an innovative solution by developing an online conformance checker specifically designed for microservice applications. The project begins with the creation of an offline conformance checker that evaluates conformance using execution traces and sequence diagrams. The work then progresses to an online conformance checker, significantly improving performance and delivering conformance results within approximately 30 seconds per trace. This rapid response time meets the requirement for swift identification and correction of non-conforming sequences, thereby offering a practical and effective tool for managing microservice applications.

Ricardo presented his work very well using beautifully prepared slides. He confidently answered questions from the audience and the examination committee and left the session with a good grade. Ricardo is now moving on from his studies to start his career at CGI. We wish him the best of luck in his future career.

MasCot Program: Bridging Academia and Industry for High-Tech Innovation in Bits & Chips Feature

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An article about strategic academic programming at TNO-ESI has appeared in Bits & Chips. The MasCot program, a collaboration co-funded by ESI and the Dutch research council NWO, is designed to tackle the increasing complexity of high-tech equipment.  The program addresses the pressing need for advanced engineering methodologies through four projects covering essential topics, such as design space exploration during early system design, scheduling, verification, and restructuring of evolving software. In the article, I explain how the 3-million-euro program facilitates the transition of academic research into practical industrial applications, creating an innovation funnel that spans from academic research through applied research to industrial embedding. The program’s strategic approach not only mitigates the risks associated with high-reward, complex projects but also fosters a symbiotic relationship between academia, industry, and TNO, allowing for a continuous exchange of knowledge, challenges, and innovations.

Master Thesis Shines Light on Hardware Dimensioning for Cyber-Physical Systems

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On Wednesday, Marijn Vollaard defended his master thesis “Hardware Dimensioning for Microservice-based Cyber-Physical Systems: A Profiling and Performance Prediction Method” at the University of Amsterdam. This research has been supervised by Ben Pronk and myself as a part of a project with TNO-ESI.

The thesis addresses the problem of determining the number of homogeneous compute nodes needed for a particular variant of a cyber-physical system to meet its timing requirements. This is important in early discussions with customers and bidding processes, since it affects the size and cost of the resulting system. To this end, the thesis proposes a structured hardware dimensioning methodology comprising a profiling method and a performance prediction method. The four novel contributions of the thesis are: 1) A component-based profiling method, 2) a performance prediction method, 3) a structured hardware dimensioning methodology, and 4) validation of the approach, using a case study that represents a prototype of a CPS. Experimental evaluations on the case study show that the predicted performance differs from measurements on the application by at most 20%, which is satisfactory for hardware dimensioning decisions for new product variants.

The defense went well and Marijn confidently presented his story and convincingly answered the questions of the audience. The examination committee, impressed by his work, awarded his thesis a well-deserved grade of 8. As we bid farewell to Marijn, embarking on his next career adventure, we also extend our heartfelt congratulations. He certainly has much to be proud of. We wish him all the best on his travels and in his future pursuits.