Archimedes 2026

Internationally leading research partners and industry partners joined forces in a workshop hosted by TNO-ESI.

This lively 2.5-day workshop was led by Arjan Mooij and addressed a shared systems engineering challenge: how to organize Verification and Validation (V&V) of complex cyber-physical systems (CPS) in ways that support faster learning, reduced risk and better-informed decisions throughout development.

Discussions confirmed that conventional approaches are under pressure as cyber-physical systems become more software-intensive, more connected, and more dependent on data. Participants therefore discussed not only technical methods, but also the organizational conditions required to make V&V effective in practice. Another outcome was the conclusion that effective V&V depends on an ecosystem of testbeds rather than a single environment, with different configurations serving different purposes, from early validation and concept exploration to formal verification. Clarifying how these environments relate to one another, and what level of fidelity they require, is an important step towards a scalable reference architecture for testbeds.

The value of the workshop lies not only in the content discussed, but also in the quality of the interaction.

The workshop was organized within the context of the Archimedes initiative: a structural collaboration between TNO-ESI, the DLR Institute of Systems Engineering for Future Mobility in Germany, the Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC) in the United States, and the Swedish Center for Trustworthy Edge Computing Systems and Applications (TECoSA) at KTH. The initiative focuses on commonalities in otherwise different application domains: mobility, healthcare, energy and defence. For this workshop, two additional research centers were present: Fraunhofer IESE from Germany and the University of South-Eastern Norway (USN). A very valuable addition was the open exchange with participants from the Dutch high-tech industry: Canon Production Printing, Thales, Thermo Fisher Scientific, and Vanderlande.

The next step is to continue the collaboration by consolidating the workshop outcomes into a joint report and define follow-up research directions. As such, the workshop stands as both a concrete technical milestone and a strategic signal: progress in systems engineering increasingly depends on strong knowledge partnerships, and TNO-ESI is actively helping to shape that agenda.