An article about strategic academic programming at TNO-ESI has appeared in Bits & Chips. The MasCot program, a collaboration co-funded by ESI and the Dutch research council NWO, is designed to tackle the increasing complexity of high-tech equipment. The program addresses the pressing need for advanced engineering methodologies through four projects covering essential topics, such as design space exploration during early system design, scheduling, verification, and restructuring of evolving software. In the article, I explain how the 3-million-euro program facilitates the transition of academic research into practical industrial applications, creating an innovation funnel that spans from academic research through applied research to industrial embedding. The program’s strategic approach not only mitigates the risks associated with high-reward, complex projects but also fosters a symbiotic relationship between academia, industry, and TNO, allowing for a continuous exchange of knowledge, challenges, and innovations.
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.
Official Project Kick-off for DSE 2.0
Today was the official project kick-off for the research project “Design Space Exploration 2.0: Towards Optimal Design of Complex, Distributed Cyber Physical Systems”. This project is a part of the Partnership Program Mastering Complexity (MasCot), funded by NWO Domain Applied and Engineering Sciences (AES) together with ESI (TNO). The University of Amsterdam and Leiden University are the academic partners, spearheaded by Andy Pimentel and Todor Stefanov. The carrying industrial partner is ASML, but with Philips, Siemens and ESI as parts of the user committee.
The main goal of the project is to extend existing methods for design-space exploration, often developed for on-chip systems, to cover complex distributed cyber-physical systems (dCPS), such as the lithography machines made by ASML. Designers of such systems need quick answers to so-called “what-if” questions with respect to possible design decisions/choices and their consequences on non-functional properties, such as system performance and cost. This calls for efficient and scalable system level design space exploration (DSE) methods that integrate appropriate application workload and system architectures models, simulation and optimization techniques, as well as supporting tools to facilitate the exploration of a wide range of design decisions. However, such DSE technology for complex dCPS does currently not exist. This projects hence tries to answer the question of how perform efficient and effective DSE for complex, distributed cyber-physical systems.
In today’s kick-off meeting, all stakeholders in the project had an opportunity to introduce themselves and refamiliarize themselves with the project and its goals. The two PhD students who will be working on the project, Marius and Faezeh, from UvA and Leiden, respectively, also gave a brief overview of the work they had done in the first three months of the project, which included a literature review and generation of high-level simulation models for different parameter settings.
I am directly involved in this project through my part-time appointment at UvA. As Marius’ second promotor, I will help him on his journey towards a PhD. I also have an interest in this project as an ESI Research Fellow and part of the MasCot Core Team. In this capacity, I am happy to help linking this project to ESI’s applied research projects, in particular at ASML, to exploit possible synergies, and to stimulate exchanges with other projects in the MasCot program.