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It is a fantastic feeling when research results in industry impact! We recently celebrated that our course Modelling and Analysis of Component-based Systems (MOANA-CBS) was given for the 10th time at Thales. We celebrated this milestone with an appropriately themed cake. In total, about 100 systems and software engineers have now been trained in specification and verification of software interfaces using Eclipse CommaSuite. Hats of to our Thales trainers, Jeroen Kouwer and Mark Horsthuis, who are giving the trainings. The word on the street is that seats for the course are still filling up quickly and that more instances of the course are to be expected in the future.

It is not only engineers at Thales that benefit from MOANA-CBS. We also made an academic version of the course that focuses on modelling and verification of software interfaces using Petri nets, allowing students to learn some basics of model-based engineering using examples from the world of systems and software engineering. This material is given as a part of my course Model-based Design of Cyber-physical Systems, which is given to approximately 80 software engineers at University of Amsterdam every year. By now, more than 300 students have learned from this material.

The MOANA-CBS course is a result from the DYNAMICS project, a public-private collaboration between Thales and TNO-ESI that ran between 2019-2021. For more information about the the project and a demo, please read more here.

I recently had the opportunity to visit the CISTER Research Center for Real-time and Embedded Computing in Porto. It was a great chance to reconnect with former colleagues from my previous tenure there. During my visit, I was invited give a presentation focusing on the complexity challenges in high-tech equipment and ESI’s vision on model-driven performance engineering in this field. The talk also highlighted the growing use of microservice architectures in cyber-physical systems to address the complexity drivers. I explained that while there are good open source tools for instrumenting applications and gathering telemetry data, such as metrics, logs, and traces, new automated analysis methods are needed to reduce the effort of optimizing, verifying, and diagnosing system performance. In this context, I introduced a framework for telemetry-based performance engineering that can be used to address a number of performance challenges. In particular, I explained how it could be used to check whether the system implementation conforms to a UML specification, both in terms of timing and behavior, and to perform performance prediction.

The presentation, which was attended by a group of approximately 15 staff members and PhD students, was well-received and led to fruitful discussions about the relation between real-time systems research and performance engineering. . The visit concluded wonderfully with a delightful dinner with the institute’s director, Prof. Eduardo Tovar, in Matosinhos.