Highlights from TNO-ESI at ICT.OPEN 2025

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.

Mastering Complexity at ICT.Open

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!

PhD Defense on Governance of Complex Cyber-infrastructure

Today, I chaired a PhD committee at the University of Amsterdam. The PhD candidate Mostafa Mohajeri Parizi defended his dissertation “An Agent-based Approach to the Governance of Complex Cyber-Infrastructures”. The dissertation explores the impact of digitization on society and the need for engineering approaches to ensure that digital systems comply with regulations. Mostafa did his PhD research in the Complex Cyber-Infrastructure (CCI) group under the supervision of TNO colleague Tom van Engers (Principal Scientist ISP DS). The work centers on the use of computational agents and norms to develop tools and methodologies for governing socio-technical systems. The study introduces ASC2, an agent-based programming framework built on the belief-desire-intention model, alongside a scalable multi-agent system environment. It emphasizes the integration of mainstream software development tools into agent-based programming and enhances transparency and decision-making in agents by incorporating context-dependent preferences. Furthermore, the dissertation proposes a modular architecture for integrating norms into multi-agent systems, allowing for the flexible adoption and reasoning of norms without compromising agent autonomy. This is illustrated through two case studies demonstrating the framework’s application in coordinating agent actions and aligning them with encoded laws. The research highlights the potential of agent and norm models in improving the design and policy-making of digital infrastructures.

Mostafa did a good job presenting and defending his work and the committee were impressed by the breadth of the research. We hope the newly minted Dr. Mohajeri Parizi enjoyed the ceremony and the celebration with his friends and family and wish him all the best of luck in his future career.

Call for Papers and Experts – 30th IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS 2024) in Hong Kong

I have the honor of being the Program Chair of the 30th IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS 2024), located in Hong Kong May 13-16 next year. Please see the Call for Papers below.

Soon, it will be time to put together the Technical Program Committee (TPC) that will review and select the papers that will appear in the conference program. If you are interested in joining the TPC of this conference, or any other conference (co-)sponsored by the Technical Community of Real-Time Systems (TCRTS), please fill out the TPC self-nomination form as soon as possible. We always welcome self-nominations from our own community, but this year we especially encourage self-nominations from the academic performance engineering community, as well as members of the industry that work with real-time requirements or performance engineering, defined in a broad sense.

If you have any questions, please feel to reach out to me. If want to self-nominate, click this link. A self-nomination is not a firm commitment, it is just a declaration of interest that may result in an invitation.

———————————————————————————————————————

30th IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS 2024)

Hong Kong, May 13-16, 2024

———————————————————————————————————————

CALL FOR PAPERS

———————————————————————————————————————

RTAS is a top-tier conference with a focus on time-sensitive systems. RTAS’24 invites papers describing case studies, applications, methodologies, and algorithms that contribute to the state of practice in design, implementation, verification, validation, and evolution of time-sensitive systems. RTAS’24 consists of two tracks:

  • Track 1. Systems and Applications;
  • Track 2. Applied Methodologies and Foundations.

In both tracks, papers must consider some kind of timing requirements. The timing requirements of interest are broadly defined and include not only classical hard real-time constraints, but also soft real-time, probabilistic, quality-of-service (QoS), throughput or latency requirements. The application area can be any type of time-sensitive systems, ranging from resource-constrained embedded systems to cyber-physical systems (CPS), cloud/edge/fog computing systems, cloud data centers, Internet of Things (IoT), mobile computing, robotics,  smart grid, and smart cities, as well as middleware and frameworks, machine learning in or for time-sensitive systems and signal processing algorithms that execute in real time. RTAS welcomes both papers backed by formal proofs, as well as papers that focus exclusively on empirical validation of timing requirements, e.g., using traces or performance models inferred from operational data. Research results from fundamental research, (case-driven) applied research, and (pragmatic) industry practice are all in scope.

RTAS’24 follows a double-anonymous peer reviewing process: author identities and affiliations will not be revealed to reviewers. Authors will have the opportunity to provide a response to reviews before acceptance decisions are made, solely to provide clarifications and correct misconceptions. The response will not allow authors to introduce new material beyond the original submission, or promise such material for the camera-ready version. There will be an optional evaluation process for accepted papers that assesses the reproducibility of the work.

Track 1: Systems and Applications

This track focuses on research of an empirical nature pertaining to (system- or component-) level analysis, optimization, and verification, as well as applications, runtime software, and hardware architectures for time-sensitive systems.

Topics relevant to this track include, but are not limited to:

  • time-sensitive applications
  • real-time and embedded operating systems,
  • hypervisors and runtime frameworks,
  • hardware architectures, memory hierarchies, FPGAs, GPUs and accelerators,
  • time-sensitive networks, CPS/IoT infrastructure,
  • microservice technologies, cloud and edge computing, real-time artificial intelligence and machine learning,
  • application profiling, WCET analysis, compilers, tools, benchmarks and case studies.

Papers discussing design and implementation experiences on real industrial systems are especially encouraged. Papers submitted to this track should focus on specific systems and implementations. Authors must include a section with experimental results performed on a real implementation, or demonstrate applicability to an industrial case study or working system. The experiment or case study discussions must highlight the key lessons learned. Simulation-based results are acceptable for architectural simulation, or other cases where authors clearly motivate why it is not feasible to develop and evaluate a real system.

Empirical survey-based research focused on the real-time systems field is also welcome in this track. This type of research uses surveys, questionnaires, interviews, use cases or other empirical techniques to obtain information about the past / current / future state of play in the research, design, development, verification, validation, and deployment of time-sensitive systems.

Track 2: Applied Methodologies and Foundations

This track focuses on fundamental models, and analysis techniques/methods that are applicable to time-sensitive systems to solve specific problems. The track welcomes knowledge-based models, models built from operational data, as well as a combination, and different types of analysis methods, including analytical, statistical, or probabilistic methods. Topics relevant to this track include, but are not limited to:

  • modelling languages, modelling methods, model learning, model validation and calibration,
  • scheduling and resource allocation,
  • system-level optimization and co-design techniques,
  • design space exploration,
  • verification and validation methodologies.

Papers must describe the main context or use case for the proposed methods giving clear motivating examples based on real systems. The system models and any assumptions used in the derivation of the methods must be applicable to real systems, and reflect actual needs. Papers must include a section on experimental results, preferably including a case study based on information from a real system. The use of synthetic workloads and models is acceptable if appropriately motivated and used to provide a systematic evaluation.

Important Dates

Submission Deadline (firm): October 31, 2023
Author Response Period: January 8-12, 2024
Author Notification: January 19, 2024
Conference Date: May 13-16, 2024

 

Inaugural Lecture Explores Managing Complexity of High-Tech Systems

Today, I finally gave my inaugural lecture “Managing Complexity in High-tech Systems” to celebrate my appointment as Endowed Professor at the University of Amsterdam, which happened back in 2019.

The academic ceremony started at 16:00 with a small reception for fellow professors and members of the curatorium. Together, this group walked in a procession into the beautiful auditorium of the University of Amsterdam, where an audience of colleagues, family, and friends, where waiting in anticipation. The lecture discussed the challenge of increasing complexity in the high-tech equipment industry and how new (model-based) development methodologies leveraging abstraction, boundedness, and composition, are required to address it. I argued that the required innovation should come from collaboration in an innovation chain, where universities, applied research organizations, and industry work together in strategic partnerships. The presentation was concluded with a number of concrete examples of what this collaboration could look like, based on examples from my education and research at TNO and the University of Amsterdam. The inaugural lecture was followed by a reception full of networking and congratulations. I would like to thank everybody that showed up for the event, physically and online. Together, we created a memory that I will treasure for a lifetime.

If you did not manage to attend the lecture, or see it online, there is a recording available. Pop some popcorn, take a seat, and click the link below:

https://webcolleges.uva.nl/Mediasite/Play/99497b81432a49acb57f0ae7a32050d11d

Driving Innovation and Collaboration: Dutch Real-time Days Event Sparks Ideas for Future Research and Industry Relevance

I recently co-organized a Dutch Real-time Days event together with real-time systems researchers from TU/e and UT. The event was funded through a 4TU.NIRICT Call Community Funding and its goals were to:

1) share and develop new ideas for real-time systems research,
2) stimulate new collaborations, and
3) networking.

In addition to the four organizers from the Netherlands, Mitra Nasri (TU/e), Geoffrey Nelissen (TU/e), Kuan-Hsun Chen (UT), and myself, four well-established European researchers in the area of real-time systems were invited to the event. Everybody was invited to pitch their current work, ideas for future directions, and appropriate mechanisms to support collaborations. This was followed by brainstorming sessions were these ideas were creatively improved, as well as a working session where some of the ideas were discussed in more detail and made actionable. At the end of the first day, there was a lovely dinner at Restaurant Giornale in Eindhoven, providing further room for discussions and networking.

The outcome of the two days was a mix of technical ideas that can be pursued in future research papers or project proposals, and actions to shape direction of the academic real-time systems community and further increase its industrial relevance. For example, we agreed to propose that the Technical Community on Real-time Systems (TCRTS) adds an award for industry impact/technology transfer and propose a special issue on industry challenges/visions in the Journal of Real-time Systems.

Survey of Industry Practice on Top Lists of Real-time Systems Journal 2021

I am pleased to see that our work “A comprehensive survey of industry practice in real-time systems” made both the lists for most downloaded and most cited articles in the Real-time Systems journal of 2021. I hope this is an indicator that people appreciate the paper, but also that it inspires other to pursue empirical survey-based or interview-based research in the area of real-time systems.

Next week, Mitra Nasri will pitch the case for empirical research into industry practice and perspective in real-time systems at ECRTS. Don’t miss the opportunity to hear her speak and share your thoughts on this topic and how it may help the field forward. For those of you that are not able to attend ECRTS, you can read my blog making the case for empirical survey-based research here.

Serving the Real-time Systems Community

I have been a part of the academic real-time systems community for many years by serving on the technical program committee of many key conferences, as well as reviewing articles for the real-time systems journal. This year, I am serving the real-time systems community in the following four ways.

I look forward to working with and serving the community in these roles.

Modelling and Analysis of Component-based Systems (MOANA-CBS) Course Update

Last year, ESI (TNO) and Thales developed a two-day course on Modelling and Analysis of Component-based Systems (MOANA-CBS) as a part of the DYNAMICS project. The course addresses the trend to tackle software complexity by decomposing monolithic software into loosely coupled components. While this trend manages complexity through improved scalability, adaptability, and testability, it also increases concurrency and asynchronous communication. This may in turn lead to an explosion in possible behaviors. As a consequence, it is hard to oversee the behavior of such systems, resulting in situations where early design errors are detected much later in the system lifecycle with exponentially rising costs. The course targets software and system architects/engineers involved in design and implementation of components and interfaces, and teaches methods for modelling and analyzing them to guarantee that they are free from deadlocks, livelocks, races, and buffer overflows.

We piloted the course material both in academic and industrial environments. The former was as a part of my course Embedded Software and Systems, a part of the Software Engineering Master  at the University of Amsterdam. The latter was as a part of the Accelerate program run by Thales and Luminis to accelerate their medior software talent to a senior level. Thales recently published an interview with Patrick Schulenberg, one of the participants in the program, about his experience. Patrick explains that the program has been an excellent opportunity for him to grow within the company, and mentions the positive impact of our course: “ESI taught a class about interface modeling, sharing their experiences with using the Comma framework at Philips – this was a trigger for us to put practical modeling proficiency on our roadmap”.

Currently, we are developing an updated version of the MOANA-CBS course that will have closer ties to ComMA, an open-source domain-specific language initially developed by Philips and ESI that is currently used by several companies. This update will strengthen the practical applicability of the course for users of ComMA, and will introduce unfamiliar users to interface modelling and analysis through hands-on experience with the tool. The new version of the course is expected to be ready in Q3.

Thales and University of Amsterdam Strengthen the ESI Ecosystem

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