Tag: mascot

3rd Annual MasCot Program Day 2023 Focuses on Technology Transfer and Industry-Academia Collaboration

Posted on by bennyakesson

In a bid to spearhead advancements in engineering methodologies and manage the increasing complexity of industrial systems, the third annual Mastering Complexity (MasCot) Program Day was successfully held on Tuesday, October 10, 2023. The MasCot program, a six-year strategic academic initiative jointly funded by TNO-ESI and NWO, has brought together leading universities and research organizations to pioneer the next generation of engineering methods, promoting cost-effective and high-quality development of industrial systems. The program consists of four key projects: 1) Scheduling Adaptive Modular Flexible Manufacturing Systems (TU/e, TU Delft, Radboud University), 2) Programming and Validating Software Restructurings (TU Delft, TU/e), 3) Testing in Times of Continuous Change (Radboud University, Twente University), and 4) Design Space Exploration 2.0: Towards Optimal Design of Complex, Distributed Cyber Physical Systems (UvA, Leiden University).

This year, Radboud University hosted the event at Hotel Van der Valk Nijmegen-Lent, drawing a crowd of 38 attendees from academia, industry, NWO, and TNO-ESI. With the first MasCot projects set to conclude in 2024, the theme of this year's gathering revolved around technology transfer. The event commenced with project updates from each of the four projects. During breaks, attendees had the opportunity to engage in technical dialogues with PhD students, who presented their work on posters. A highlight of the day was the keynote address delivered by Sjoerd Verduyn Lunel, head of ASML research (a.i.). Verduyn. A key message of his presentation was the required improvement of productivity of design engineers by a factor of 2.5 in the next ten years to keep up the pace of innovation. ASML is therefore engaging in defining road maps and establishing long-term collaborations with academic partners and research organization, such as TNO. He also described how ASML are differentiating projects at different levels of maturity, from fundamental research to proofs-of-concept, and how they scale up and transfer knowledge between these phases. This keynote was well-appreciated and many participants were inspired by this structured approach to programming and managing research and innovation.

The afternoon was dedicated to breakout sessions where participants shared their perspectives on technology transfer and discussed the roles that various MasCot stakeholders—universities, industry, NWO, and ESI—can concretely play in facilitating this critical process. The day concluded with a networking session and dinner, marking another successful edition of the MasCot Program Day.

Mastering Complexity – Academia, Industry and TNO working intimately together

Posted on by bennyakesson

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:

  1. Scheduling Adaptive Modular Flexible Manufacturing Systems (SAM-FMS)
  2. Programming and Validating Software Restructurings
  3. TiCToC – Testing in Times of Continuous Change
  4. 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.

Position paper accepted at DSD 2022

Posted on by bennyakesson

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

Posted on by bennyakesson

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.

Four Projects Granted to Fight the Complexity of Cyber-Physical Systems

Posted on by bennyakesson

During the past two years, I have been involved with setting up the Partnership Program Mastering Complexity (MasCot), funded NWO Domain Applied and Engineering Sciences together with ESI (TNO). After a long process of defining the key topics, writing the call, and aligning with applicants, four innovative research projects have finally been granted, allocating three million euros to research on software restructuring, testing, scheduling and design of cyber-physical systems. Congratulations to Andy Pimentel, Twan Basten, Jan Tretmans, Eelco Visser, and their collaborators for the accepted projects. I am looking forward to seeing the results!

The full story is available on the ESI website.