It is the end of an era. Today, Faezeh Sadat Saadatmand successfully defended her PhD dissertation “Towards Design Space Exploration of Industrial Distributed Cyber-Physical Systems“. This work has been carried out as part of the DSE2.0 project, one of the four projects in the Mastering Complexity (MasCot) program. Faezeh’s dissertation presents CompDSE, a novel methodology for Design Space Exploration (DSE) of industrial distributed cyber-physical systems (dCPS), such as ASML’s TWINSCAN lithography machines. The dissertation addresses the challenge of evaluating hardware and software architecture alternatives early in the design process by automatically deriving abstract system models from runtime execution traces, transforming them into efficient simulation models, and enabling rapid exploration of alternative computing platforms and software mappings. The proposed approach combines trace-based workload modeling, hardware platform modeling, automated tool support, and simulation-based performance evaluation, achieving high accuracy (within 2.7% of measured system performance) while evaluating complex industrial systems in under a minute per design point. The dissertation further extends the methodology with refined workload models that uncover inter- and intra-process parallelism opportunities, enabling deeper analysis and optimization of large-scale software-intensive cyber-physical systems.
Faezeh’s research has been quite impactful. In terms of scientific impact, she received the ICPS Best Paper Award in 2024 for her paper “Automated Derivation of Application Workload Models for Design Space Exploration of Industrial Distributed Cyber-Physical Systems“. From an industrial perspective, it has resulted in a three-year applied research project between TNO-ESI and ASML, that aims to further mature and extend the work while applying it to practical use cases at ASML. It is very satisfying to see the innovation chain in practice with academic research graduating to applied research with the goal of creating value for industry and society. Meanwhile, the academic research continues and I am happy to mention that an academic follow-up project of DSE2.0, called DESiRE, has been accepted by NWO and is expected to kick-off early next year. In this project, we will further extend the scientific foundation for design-space exploration of complex cyber-physical systems, again in a collaboration between University of Amsterdam, Leiden University, ASML, and TNO-ESI.
To conclude, I want to congratulate Dr. Saadatmand for her excellent research and for successfully rounding off her PhD trajectory. I wish her all the best in her future career!
