Category: ESI

Paper Accepted at PNSE 2021

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It has been almost a year since Mohammed (Madiou) Diallo submitted his bachelor thesis “Towards the Scalability of Detecting and Correcting Incompatible Service Interfaces“, which he carried out in the context of the DYNAMICS project, an applied research project between ESI (TNO) and Thales. After the thesis was finished, we discussed publishing the work as a paper and one year later, a slightly restructured and simplified version of the story has been accepted at the International Workshop on Petri Nets and Software Engineering (PNSE), a workshop co-located with the Petri Net conference.

The accepted paper is entitled “Synthetic Portnet Generation with Controllable Complexity for Testing and Benchmarking” and presents a heuristic-driven method for synthetic generation of random portnets, a kind of Petri Nets suitable for modelling software interfaces in component-based systems. The method considers three user-specified complexity parameters: the expected number input and output places, and the prevalence of non-determinism in the skeleton of the generated net. An implementation of this method is available as an open-source Python tool. Experiments demonstrate the relations between the three complexity parameters and investigate the boundaries of the proposed method. This work was helpful for the DYNAMICS project, as it allowed us to synthetically generate a large number of interfaces of varying complexity that we could use to evaluate the scalability of existing academic tools for adapter generation.

 

 

Open-source ComMA v0.1.0 officially released

Posted on by bennyakesson

Last week, the open sourcing of ComMA (Component Modelling and Analysis) in the context of the Eclipse Foundation, saw another milestone. The first version Eclipse CommaSuite is now online in the form of Release 0.1.0. ComMA is a set of DSLs used to (partially) specify the behavior of components and their interfaces, including time and data constraints. On the basis of these specifications, a number of artifacts can be automatically generated, including run-time monitors that validate compliance with the specification can be generated, visualizations, timing statistics, documentation, test cases, and adapters. Many of these features will be included in later releases of ComMA, and some of them have yet to emerge from research projects as mature features.

ComMA was originally developed by ESI and Philips, but more recently in collaboration with a growing number of other companies. For example, the DYNAMICS project in which ESI works together with Thales, we are currently investigating how adapters can be semi-automatically generated to bridge differences between components implementing different versions of interfaces. This work has been previously mentioned in an article in Bits & Chips, as well as in a paper. Currently, three master students from my Embedded Software and Systems course at UvA are also doing their graduation projects in the context of evolution of ComMA interfaces, looking into aspects of data dependencies, interface dependencies, and static impact analysis. We look forward to seeing the results of their work this summer.

You can read more about ComMA in this news article TNO published this week.
Update: The news article is now also published in Bits & Chips

ESI Featured in Nederland Maakt Het

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ESI (TNO) was featured in the latest episode (Season 4 Episode 1) of Nederland Maakt Het, a program on RTL Z about Dutch organizations that develop of apply innovative technologies. In the segment, Wouter Leibbrandt, the Research and Operations director at ESI, explains that the Netherlands has a powerful high-tech industry, which is important to its competitiveness and earning power. To stay at the top and continue to develop excellent products in light of increasing system complexity, it is important to invest in research and development of new design methodologies. Big high-tech companies do this in an open innovation environment to address the challenges they face together. ESI is the applied research organization and knowledge partner that brings the industry and academic parties together into an eco-system to facilitate this.

In my role as part-time professor at UvA, I explain my view on open innovation and how universities contribute and get value from the eco-system. In the Embedded Software and Systems course at the University of Amsterdam, which is an academic partner of ESI since 2021, I discuss the increasing system complexity with my students and teach model-based engineering methodologies to help them address this challenge. I also supervise students that want to contribute to solving the complexity problem by doing their thesis project in with ESI or in industry.  Lastly, Hein Otto Folkerts, the (former) head of Research at ASML, provides the industry view and explains the value of open innovation to ASML, one of the big high-tech companies in the Eindhoven region.

For those of you that missed the episode, it is available for online viewing on RTL XL. The segment about ESI starts at 14m30s and last for about 4 minutes. ESI also has a version of this segment in its own house style that is used for promotional purposes. This version is available here:

Official Project Kick-off for DSE 2.0

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Today was the official project kick-off for the research project “Design Space Exploration 2.0: Towards Optimal Design of Complex, Distributed Cyber Physical Systems”. This project is a part of the Partnership Program Mastering Complexity (MasCot), funded by NWO Domain Applied and Engineering Sciences (AES) together with ESI (TNO). The University of Amsterdam and Leiden University are the academic partners, spearheaded by Andy Pimentel and Todor Stefanov. The carrying industrial partner is ASML, but with Philips, Siemens and ESI as parts of the user committee.

The main goal of the project is to extend existing methods for design-space exploration, often developed for on-chip systems, to cover complex distributed cyber-physical systems (dCPS), such as the lithography machines made by ASML. Designers of such systems need quick answers to so-called “what-if” questions with respect to possible design decisions/choices and their consequences on non-functional properties, such as system performance and cost. This calls for efficient and scalable system level design space exploration (DSE) methods that integrate appropriate application workload and system architectures models, simulation and optimization techniques, as well as supporting tools to facilitate the exploration of a wide range of design decisions. However, such DSE technology for complex dCPS does currently not exist. This projects hence tries to answer the question of how perform efficient and effective DSE for complex, distributed cyber-physical systems.

In today’s kick-off meeting, all stakeholders in the project had an opportunity to introduce themselves and refamiliarize themselves with the project and its goals. The two PhD students who will be working on the project, Marius and Faezeh, from UvA and Leiden, respectively, also gave a brief overview of the work they had done in the first three months of the project, which included a literature review and generation of high-level simulation models for different parameter settings.

I am directly involved in this project through my part-time appointment at UvA. As Marius’ second promotor, I will help him on his journey towards a PhD. I also have an interest in this project as an ESI Research Fellow and part of the MasCot Core Team. In this capacity, I am happy to help linking this project to ESI’s applied research projects, in particular at ASML, to exploit possible synergies, and to stimulate exchanges with other projects in the MasCot program.

Thales and University of Amsterdam Strengthen the ESI Ecosystem

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ESI has just made a press release to announce that both Thales and the University of Amsterdam (UvA) has joined as partners in its open-innovation ecosystem. ESI’s ecosystem, based on open innovation, plays an important role in maintaining the leading competitive position of the Dutch high-tech industry. Together with universities and partner companies, ESI develops methodologies and tooling that are in line with the vision and needs of the high-tech industry, making use of the latest insights from universities. In an industry-as-a-lab setting, system engineering methodologies are developed, tested and validated on site at and with partners.

With the addition of UvA and Thales, ESI’s ecosystem now has more industrial and academic partners than ever before, which shows great promise in difficult times. Personally, I am very happy to see that the university where I work decided to further invest in its collaboration with ESI and join the partner board. Similarly, Thales is the company I have worked with in applied research projects for the past five years, and it pleases me that they see the benefits of this collaboration.

Read the full press release from ESI here.

Update:
The press release was picked up by a number of different media outlets, e.g.

UvA – UvA Informatics Institute and Thales strengthen ESI open-innovation ecosystem

Bits & Chips – Thales and UvA (re)join ESI

Emerce – Thales en het Informatica Instituut van de Universiteit van Amsterdam versterken ESI (TNO) open-innovatie ecosysteem

Link Magazine -Thales en de Universiteit van Amsterdam versterken het open-innovatie systeem van ESI TNO 

Engineers Online – Thales en UvA versterken Esi open-innovatie ecosysteem voor hightech

Embedded Software and Systems Course @ UvA Continues to Evolve

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The fall semester of the very special academic year 2020/2021 is over. Most of the students following the Master of Software Engineering program at the University of Amsterdam have just completed my course Embedded Software and Systems (ESS). The ESS course had changed in a three important ways this year.

Firstly, a generic lecture about Petri Nets was changed to a series about two lectures, explaining how Petri Nets can be used to model and analyze software interfaces and components. Part of the material for this course was reused from the course Modelling and Analysis of Component-based Systems (MOANA-CBS), developed together with Thales targeting an industrial audience. These new lectures also prime students nicely for a lecture about the DYNAMICS project, a research collaboration between ESI and Thales. This allows me to show how these models and analyses can be used in practice to address problems related to software evolution by detecting incompatibilities and generating adapters when updating software interfaces. A generic lecture about the data-flow model of computation was removed to create room for this new material, but I am happy to teach fewer modelling formalisms and have more time to go in depth and show how they can be used to solve industrial problems. A nice result of this change to the course is that three master students have accepted thesis projects in the area of modelling and analysis of software components and interfaces in collaboration with ESI under the supervision of myself and my colleague Debjyoti Bera.

Secondly, the course project was redeveloped this year. Previously, students used Mathworks Stateflow to program Lego Mindstorm EV3 rovers to follow a line, avoid obstacles, and count objects. However, this project felt a bit too much like a toy and there were technical problems with both rovers and tools that were hard to overcome and limited the education experience. In particular, it was not easily possible to see or influence how code was generated for the Lego Mindstorm robots, which felt like a missed opportunity when teaching model-based engineering. 

Two bachelor students did their theses in spring to evaluate the suitability of using the TurtleBot3 Burger robot, both in reality and in simulation using Gazebo, in the course. In addition, Stateflow was exchanged for Yakindu Statechart Tools, which is easier to use and gives us the flexibility we need in code generation. The new application developed in the project is to use Yakindu to program the TurtleBot to autonomously drive through a maze and map it.

Lastly, the COVID-19 pandemic required the entire course to be taught online. As a result, used a blended learning approach and prerecorded the lectures so that the students could watch them when they wanted to. Online interactive sessions were added to the course where the students could ask questions about the lectures, and participate in quizzes and group discussions. Online teaching meant that the students did not have access to the four physical TurtleBots that we had purchased. Luckily, the newly developed course project could be done with simulations in Gazebo. Below is a demo from one of the groups that very successfully solved the assignment. 

The ESS course is continuously evolving and maturing and next year will be no different. Most importantly, we hope that the pandemic will be over by then and that we can put our three physical TurtleBots to good use.

Model-based Engineering Dominates Software-Centric Systems Conference

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I attended the online edition of Software-Centric Systems Conference (SC2) today. Although I prefer the networking and social aspects of a physical conference, it was nice to enjoy these presentations from the comfort of my couch.

It was interesting to see that most of the conference presentations were related to domain-specific languages (DSLs) in one way or another. There were also presentations about model-based testing and digital twinning. I am not sure if model-based engineering was an intentional theme, or if this is just what is considered interesting in software-centric systems in the Netherlands for the moment. However, this suggests that the applied research into model-based design methodologies done by ESI (TNO) together with its industrial eco-system is highly relevant.

A highlight for myself was the two presentations about the Component Modelling and Analysis (ComMA) DSL. This is not only because it relates to my research on evolvable interfaces, but also because of the main message that the industry can achieve a lot through open innovation in areas that are not their core business, such as specification, verification, and evolution of software interfaces. Great news that ComMA will become open-source in 2021!

DYNAMICS Project in Keynote at Software-Centric Systems Conference

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Two months ago, I mentioned that Bits & Chips had published an article about the ComMA (Component Modelling and Analysis) language and how it is being used in Philips and Thales to address challenges related to integration and evolution. The latter part, about semi-automatic detection and correction of interface incompatibilities as interfaces evolve is the topic of the DYNAMICS project, a research project between ESI (TNO) and Thales. This joint story, where two companies from different domains together presented their challenges and how it was addressed by technology developed by ESI was much appreciated by Bits & Chips and was invited as a keynote at the Software-Centric Systems Conference (SC2), which takes place on Thursday November 5. If you are interested in hearing this keynote, please register for the event. All presentations are also available on-demand after the event in case you cannot attend in real time.

Design Methodologies for Cyber-physical Systems

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In this short two minute presentation, I introduce myself and my fundamental and academic research into design methodologies for cyber-physical systems. I sketch a high-level view of the problem and outline a direction based on model-based engineering in which my previous work into domain-specific languages and analysis non-functional behavior fits. For a more elaborate description of my research, please have a look at my research page.

Course on Modelling and Analysis of Component-based Systems

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A course called “Modelling and Analysis of Component-based Systems” (MOANA-CBS) is being developed in collaboration with Thales as a part of the DYNAMICS project. The course addresses the challenge of overseeing the explosion of possible interactions between asynchronously communicating components in component-based systems. Some of these interactions may be undesirable and leave systems prone to deadlock, livelock, race conditions, and buffer overflows, reducing software quality. The course participants in the course learn how to mitigate this problem by modelling the behavior of components and interfaces using Petri Nets, a well-known formalism suitable for describing asynchronously communicating systems. Theory is linked to practice through demonstrations of relevant examples using the ComMA tool. Using properties and analysis methods for Petri Nets, they learn how to identify patterns in component and interface design that may cause the aforementioned problems, as well as design guidelines for how to avoid them. The course is taught using a combination of lectures, assignments, demonstrations, discussions, and reflection.

We piloted parts of the course at Van der Valk Hotel in Arnhem on October 7 and 8, attended by 12 software architects from Thales and Luminis. The course was positioned as a part of their Accelerate program, which aims to accelerate young architects from the two companies into a more senior role. We felt that the delivery of the course went well and evaluations from the participants suggests it was well-received. The evaluation of this pilot also highlighted some further points for improvement that will be considered going forward.