I had the honor of being invited as keynote speaker at RT-Cloud 2023. The keynote discussed the increasing complexity of cyber-physical systems (CPS) in the Dutch high-tech systems industry and a gradual transition towards microservice architectures and cloud-connected systems. This transition challenges our experience with performance engineering in the CPS domain, as we adapt our methods to embrace new tools and technologies. To make the presentation concrete, I discussed two projects that I am currently working on, a project on performance verification of microservice architectures together with Thales, and a project about performance engineering and service continuity in the compute continuum, together with Philips and TU/e and other TRANSACT partners. I would like to thank Johan Eker and Luca Abeni for the invitation and all participants for their attention and questions.
TNO-ESI Cloud Continuum Workshop Connects Researchers and Promotes Collaboration in the Netherlands
The TNO-ESI Cloud Continuum workshop, an informal hybrid event that attracted just over twenty participants, took place at ESI on February 21. The goals of this workshop were to: 1) connect applied and academic researchers in the area of cloud continuum in the Netherlands, 2) disseminate research results from ongoing research projects, and 3) identify possibilities for collaboration. Benny Akesson, the organizer of the event, opened the workshop by presenting some drivers for cloud adoption/integration in the high-tech industry, as well as the work done by ESI in the ArchViews and TRANSACT projects related to performance observability. This was followed by four invited speakers from Eindhoven University of Technology and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. The topics of the presentations ranged from reference architectures for the cloud continuum, root-cause analysis in the continuum, modelling and calibration of cyber-physical systems deployed in the continuum, to performance variability of cloud/edge systems. All in all, it was a nice and successful event that showcased parts of the body of work currently going on in this exciting area. Thank you Matthijs Jansen, Jeroen Voeten, Mahtab Modaber, and Panagiotis Giannakopoulos for your presentations.
Mastering Complexity – Academia, Industry and TNO working intimately together
The 3rd Annual Program Day for the Mastering Complexity (MasCot) Partnership program took place on Wednesday October 19. This time, the event was hosted by the University of Amsterdam and was held in the Startup Village at Science Park. Approximately 40 participants from academia, industry, NWO, and TNO attended the event. After a brief introduction, project updates were given from the four academic projects in the program:
- Scheduling Adaptive Modular Flexible Manufacturing Systems (SAM-FMS)
- Programming and Validating Software Restructurings
- TiCToC – Testing in Times of Continuous Change
- Design Space Exploration 2.0: Towards Optimal Design of Complex, Distributed Cyber Physical Systems
This was followed by Q&A and a short interaction where participants tried to identify the general complexity management techniques used in the projects. In the afternoon, there were breakout sessions focusing on the way-of-working in MasCot projects, how to best involve and engage all stakeholders in the project: industry and academic partners, users, and ESI liaisons. This allowed the different projects to listen to how the others organized their work, e.g. in terms of regular meetings and working on industry location, during the first years and reflect on the best way-of-working to reach their goals for the next stage.
The event was followed by a social program with informal networking set to the tune of a boat ride with drinks on the beautiful canals of a sunny autumn-colored Amsterdam and a dinner at the restaurant In de Waag.
Specification, Verification, and Adaptation of Software Interfaces using Eclipse ComMASuite
Software interfaces are key to realizing the benefits of component-based software architectures, yet specifying interfaces is difficult and may result in problems in the protocol specification itself, or in its interactions with clients. This problem is addressed through a six-step methodology for specification, verification, and adaptation of software interfaces. The methodology builds on the open-source tool Eclipse ComMASuite, developed by TNO-ESI partners in an open innovation eco-system. The specification and verification steps have been contributed back to the community and are supported by a two-day course named “Modelling and Analysis of Component-based Systems”, available from TNO-ESI in both an academic and industry version.
Please read my blog post that describes the methodology and demonstrates it step-by-step from a user perspective through a simple case study in a video.
Position paper accepted at DSD 2022
I am pleased to announce that our position paper “Design Space Exploration for Distributed Cyber-Physical Systems: State-of-the-art, Challenges, and Directions” has been accepted for publication at the Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design (DSD). This is the first accepted paper from the DSE2.0 project, a collaboration between University of Amsterdam, Leiden University, and ASML. The project is a part of the Mastering Complexity (MasCot) partnership program funded by ESI.
The paper addresses the challenge of designing industrial cyber-physical systems (CPS), which are often complex, heterogeneous, and distributed computing systems that typically
integrate and interconnect a large number of hardware and software components. Producers of these distributed Cyber-Physical Systems (dCPS) require support for making (early) design decisions to avoid expensive and time consuming oversights. This calls for efficient and scalable system-level Design Space Exploration (DSE) methods for dCPS. In this position paper, we review the current state of the art in DSE, and argue that efficient and scalable DSE technology for dCPS is more or less non-existing and constitutes a largely unchartered research area. Moreover, we identify several research challenges that need to be addressed and discuss possible directions for targeting such DSE technology for dCPS.
Paper Accepted at PNSE 2022
I am happy to announce that the paper “Partial Specifications of Component-based Systems using Petri Nets” has been accepted for publication at the International Workshop on Petri Nets and Software Engineering (PNSE) 2022. This paper was first-authored by Bart-Jan Hilbrands, a (former) student in the Master of Software Engineering program at the University of Amsterdam, who did his master thesis project under the supervision of myself and my ESI colleague Debjyoti Bera. The master thesis project was conducted in the context of the DYNAMICS project, a bi-lateral research project between ESI and Thales, which looked into specification, verification, and adaptation of software interfaces. This publication is a good example of how a good master thesis can be turned into a publication.
The paper addresses the problem of verifying correctness properties, such as absence of deadlocks, livelocks, and buffer overflows, in software components with multiple inter-dependent interfaces. An approach based on partial specification of dependencies between interfaces, expressed as a set of functional constraints, is proposed in the paper. The papers presents and formalizes three commonly occurring functional constraints and provides algorithms for encoding them into a Petri net representation of the interfaces, enabling interface verification through reachability analysis. The approach has been implemented and demonstrated using ComMA.
Seven Brave Software Architects/Engineers from Thales Completes MOANA-CBS Course using Eclipse ComMASuite
ESI (TNO) has given another instance of the course “Modelling and Analysis of Component-based Systems” (MOANA-CBS), developed as part of the applied research project DYNAMICS, at Thales. A batch of 7 brave software engineers participated to learn more about how to identify and resolve a range of interface model quality problems, such as deadlocks, livelocks, and race conditions. This instance of the course was adapted to be based completely on the latest version of Eclipse ComMASuite, the open source version of ComMA, making the course accessible to a large general audience. Previously, the course has been given with an internal version of ComMA or by using Petri nets as the interface modelling language.
In total, over 110 participants, mostly with backgrounds in system and software engineering, have followed different versions of this course. This time, two former Thales participants assisted in giving the course, both by presenting contents and supervising exercises, to help Thales transfer the knowledge developed in the DYNAMICS project into the organization. We look forward to further improve the material and keep sharing the knowledge we developed with Thales and other interested parties.
Article about Survey-based Study into Industry Practice in Real-time Systems in Real-time Systems Journal
It has been almost a year since we published the first survey-based study in the area of real-time systems at the Real-time Systems Symposium (RTSS) back in December 2020. The paper was entitled “An Empirical Survey-based Study into Industry Practice in Real-time Systems” and had the ambitious goal of addressing the gap between academic research and industry practice through an empirical survey-based study into industry practice. The survey had five objectives: 1) Establish whether timing predictability is of concern to the real-time embedded systems industry, 2) Identify relevant industrial problem contexts, including hardware platforms, middleware, and software, 3) Determine which methods and tools are used to achieve timing predictability, 4) Establish which techniques and tools are used to satisfy real-time requirements, and 5) Determine trends for future real-time systems. The survey was completed by 120 industry practitioners in the field of real-time embedded systems, which allowed interesting observations and insights to be made about the characteristics of the systems being developed today and important trends for the future.
Now, almost one year later, I am happy to announce that an extended version of our RTSS paper has been accepted for publication in the Real-time Systems journal. The title of the article is “A Comprehensive Survey of Industry Practice in Real-Time Systems“. The main extensions in the article include: 1) a discussion of potential threats to validity of the survey and its results, as well as the steps taken to mitigate them, 2) a statistical analysis and discussion of the results of the survey, in the context of its five objectives, 3) a discussion of the results of a quiz aimed at determining if the aggregate findings of the survey are common knowledge in the real-time systems community. In addition, more aggregated data from the survey has been released, allowing interested readers to further delve into the similarities and differences between the avionics, automotive, and consumer electronic domains.
We hope that you enjoy the article!
Paper about Model-driven System Performance Engineering Accepted at ESWEEK Industry Session
The System Performance Expertise Team at ESI (TNO) has worked for a long time to consolidate our many years of experience across projects and companies. This effort has now culminated in a paper entitled “Model-driven System Performance Engineering for Cyber-physical Systems“, which has been accepted for the industry session at the Embedded Systems Week (ESWEEK) in October.
The paper describes ESI’s current view on the field of System-Performance Engineering (SysPE). SysPE encompasses modeling formalisms, methods, techniques, and industrial practices to design systems for performance, where performance is taken integrally into account during the whole system life cycle. Industrial SysPE state of practice is generally model-based. Due to the rapidly increasing complexity of systems, there is a need to develop and establish model-driven methods and techniques. To structure the field of SysPE, the paper identifies: (1) industrial challenges motivating the importance of SysPE, (2) scientific challenges that need to be addressed to establish model-driven SysPE, (3) important focus areas for SysPE and (4) best practices. A survey was conducted to collect feedback on our views. The responses were used to update and validate the identified challenges, focus areas, and best practices. The final result is presented in this paper. Interesting observations are that industry sees a need for better design-space exploration support, more than for additional performance modeling and analysis techniques. Also tools and integral methods for SysPE need attention. From the identified focus areas, scheduling and supervisory control is seen as lacking established best practices.
The paper will be presented as a part of Industry Session 2 at ESWEEK on October 12. The second talk of that session presents why and how ITEC, Nexperia, a world-leading manufacturer of semiconductor equipment, is moving towards model-driven system-level development. The session ends with a moderated Q&A. Since ESWEEK is an online event this year, you can register for 20 USD if you want to attend the conference and the session.
Update: The video of the Industry session is now available:
Project Proposal about Energy Labels for Digital Services Granted
It is my pleasure to announce our project proposal entitled “Zero-Waste Computing: Energy Labels for Digital Services” has been granted for the Science and Design PhD program at the University of Amsterdam. Ana Lucia Varbanescu is the main applicant for this project, with Anuj Pathania and myself as co-applicants. The project proposal was supported by Surf, ESI (TNO), Barcelona Supercomputing Center, and ASTRON.
The project addresses the issue that digital services are getting increasingly prevalent in society and are vital to the Dutch economy, already reaching 60% of GDP. However, they come with a significant, rapidly-increasing energy cost, raising sustainability concerns, since a mid-size datacenter alone consumes as much energy as a small town. However, datacenters are only the final link in a digital chain. Users interacting with devices — mobile phones, tablets, or laptops — trigger entire digital chains, combining multiple communicating computing layers and data transfers: from the device itself, through the edge, to the datacenter. Each layer has its own computing infrastructure (see figure). At each layer, decisions are made about how, where and when applications are running and/or data are transferred. These decisions have a significant impact on the user-perceived quality-of-service (QoS), but also on the energy consumption – per layer, and for the entire digital chain. The energy footprint of different devices along the chain might be known, but the actual energy consumed by the application is unknown, because it depends on infrastructure choices, and on user QoS requirements, and on mapping decisions made on the edge and in the datacenter. Thus, the energy efficiency, i.e., the amount of energy consumed to perform the actual task at hand, is largely unknown, for most digital chains.
We argue that the first step to reduce waste in computing is to quantify the energy efficiency of end-to-end digital chains. Our project focuses on designing an integrated framework (i.e., the methods, metrics, and tools) for this quantification effort. Specifically, we aim to define a reference architecture of digital chains, use it to define an analytical digital-chain energy-efficiency model that exposes the factors that impact energy efficiency along the chain, and support it with a high-level functional simulator to assess different operational scenarios and parameters that affect the energy efficiency of digital chains.
This is a small project funding only a single PhD student. More momentum is required to further advance this area and make a step from only monitoring the energy consumption of digital chains to also include actuation, e.g. energy minimization through workload redistribution, subject to performance constraints. We are currently looking for interested parties to collaborate with us on this topic in future project proposals.