Category: ESI

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.

Component Modelling and Analysis (ComMA) in Bits & Chips

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Bits & Chips just published an article about ComMA (Component Modelling and Analysis). ComMA addresses key design and verification challenges for complex systems comprising many components developed by different parties, challenges that are frequently encountered in the high-tech industry across application domains. The challenges are tackled by allowing structure and behavior of component interfaces to be formally specified using a set of domain-specific languages. From this specification, a number of artifacts are automatically generated, including system tests, run-time monitors that detect protocol violations, performance metrics, and documentation. Together, these artifacts reduce the time to design, integrate, and evolve complex high-tech systems, allowing the next generation of these systems to be developed faster and with higher quality.

ComMA was developed by ESI (TNO) in applied research projects with Philips. Successfully proving the approach in an industrial context at Philips has sparked interest from other companies, including Thermo Fisher Scientific, Thales, and Kulicke & Soffa. This eco-system of high-tech companies is expected to increase further as the ComMA tooling becomes open source as part of the Eclipse Foundation.

The article also mentions the applied research project DYNAMICS, for which I am the technical lead. Here, ESI and Thales have been looking at challenges and opportunities related to the evolution of interfaces. The strong point of interfaces is that they abstract from the component providing a particular functionality, allowing it to be changed or even replaced without compromising the overall functionality of the system. However, eventually the interfaces themselves need to be updated to prevent technical debt, and at that point all components relying on that interface are affected simultaneously. In the DYNAMICS project, we study how to automatically detect whether a change to the protocol of an interface is backwards compatible and if this is not the case, semi-automatically generate adapters that bridge the differences with previous versions. The benefit of this approach is that it reduces the time and cost of interface updates, allowing them to evolve faster and avoid creative workarounds that ultimately lead to unreliable systems and lower software quality. If you are interested in reading more about this work and how it leverages ComMA and Petri Net technology to achieve this, read this overview paper from last year.

Comma interfaces open the door to reliable high-tech systems

Bachelor Thesis on Synthetic Interface Generation Defended

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Mohammed (Mo) Diallo just defended his bachelor thesis entitled “Towards the Scalability of Detecting and Correcting Incompatible Service Interfaces“. This work is carried out in the context of a project between ESI (TNO) and Thales that developed a five-step methodology for automatic detection and correction of behavioral incompatibilities resulting from evolving software interfaces (see paper for more details). Mo’s thesis provides a starting point for evaluating the scalability of the proposed methodology. An essential ingredient towards this is the ability to synthetically generate interfaces of various complexity. The thesis has two main contributions: 1) a notion of interface complexity in terms of inputs, outputs and non-determinism is defined and the relation between these parameters is studied, and 2) the methodology for a ComMA interface generator using user-supplied complexity parameters, and its implementation in a supporting tool, is introduced.

I would like to thank Mo for the excellent work he delivered in this thesis, and I am happy that he will continue working over summer to extend it.

Four Projects Granted to Fight the Complexity of Cyber-Physical Systems

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During the past two years, I have been involved with setting up the Partnership Program Mastering Complexity (MasCot), funded NWO Domain Applied and Engineering Sciences together with ESI (TNO). After a long process of defining the key topics, writing the call, and aligning with applicants, four innovative research projects have finally been granted, allocating three million euros to research on software restructuring, testing, scheduling and design of cyber-physical systems. Congratulations to Andy Pimentel, Twan Basten, Jan Tretmans, Eelco Visser, and their collaborators for the accepted projects. I am looking forward to seeing the results!

The full story is available on the ESI website.

Announcement of Appointment as Professor at UvA

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The press release announcing my appointment as Professor at the University of Amsterdam is finally ready. Time to make them and ESI (TNO) proud!

The Chair of Design Methodologies for Cyber-Physical Systems focuses on two research areas. The first area considers design methodologies for cyber-physical systems in which abstraction, provided by models used for specification, analysis, simulation, or synthesis, play an essential role. While this area applies to cyber-physical systems in general, the second area focuses on design aspects of real-time systems. Together, these two areas capture much of my existing work in both academic (TU/e, CTU Prague, CISTER) and applied research (ESI) in different application domains and industries in which I have worked, e.g. avionics (Airbus), consumer electronics (Philips & NXP), and defense (Thales). They are also broad enough to sustain a long-term effort towards managing complexity of cyber-physical systems. For more information about the research, click the ‘Research‘ button in the menu at the top of the page.

My first mission will involve developing and teaching a course on Embedded Software and Systems, a course that is extremely relevant to our work at ESI. The course is primarily aimed at students following the Master in Software Engineering and teaches the fundamentals of embedded system development. This includes modelling systems using StateCharts, Petri Nets, Data-flow graphs, and Domain-Specific Languages, embedded hardware, functional and timing verification, and design-space exploration. I will also explain the industrial reality behind some of these aspects by drawing on my experience from projects at ESI.

During the course, the students will get practical experience with model-based engineering as they work in groups to program a LEGO Mindstorm Rover using Stateflow to autonomously follow a path, while avoiding obstacles. From this batch of students, I am hoping to find some promising ones that can help us make the next innovative steps in model-based engineering for complex cyber-physical systems for their thesis project.

Back from MODELS 2019

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After six days in Munich I have now left the MODELS 2019 conference. It has been an intense couple of days with three days of workshops and tutorials, and three days of main conference. Both the technical and social aspects of the conference were exceptionally well-organized, so kudos to the men and women who worked hard to make that happen.

The four main highlights at the conference for me were:
1. Presenting our paper “Towards Continuous Evolution through Automatic Detection and Correction of Service Incompatibilities” at the MODCOMP workshop. Discussions with conference participants about Petri Net transformations have given inspiration for how to formally work with more complex service behaviors than we do in our work on service-oriented architectures today.

2. A tutorial on StateCharts that improved my understanding of a model-of-computation I will be teaching at the University of Amsterdam in the near future. Thanks to Simon van Mierlo, Hans Vangheluwe, and Axel Terfloth for organizing this tutorial and for sharing their excellent material.

3. Meeting and discussing with representatives from BMW, Daimler, MAN, Continental, TTTech, and other automotive companies and hear more about automotive trends towards centralization of computation, first through domain controllers and then further towards integration of domains in automotive “supercomputers”. It was also interesting to see that the automotive industry is showing interest in service-oriented architectures as a paradigm for their platforms. In fact, a paper entitled “Model-Based Resource Analysis and Synthesis of Service-Oriented Automotive Software Architectures” from BMW got the Best Paper Award on the Practice and Innovation track for work in this direction. This confirms our belief that our current applied research on service-oriented architectures in the defense domain can be generalized to other domains.

4. Meeting and talking to people from both Flanders Make and CETIC, which are the Flemish and Wallonian equivalents of ESI (TNO). It was interesting to talk to them and learn about how what we do is similar and different, both in terms of technical scope and business models.

I hope to return to the MODELS conference again next year to present more of our work and have another opportunity to discuss with and learn from top academics and industrialists in the area of model-based engineering.

Impressions from the ESI Symposium

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The ESI Symposium took place on April 9 in the Auditorium of Eindhoven University of Technology. The theme this year was “Intelligence, the next challenge in system complexity?” and featured keynotes from Edward Lee (Professor, UC Berkley) and Henk van Houten (CTO and Head of Research for Royal Philips).  The event was visited by some 300 participants, with a good balance between academia and industry. For those of you who could not attend, feel free to read about the program on the ESI website, and look at the video below for an impression of the event.