Scientific publications

For industry, including high-tech manufacturing industry and OEMs, it is foreseeable that new regulations will be stricter on environmental sustainability and circularity indicators. The cus-tomers (who are businesses themselves) will face the same regulations and will therefore increasingly push their suppliers to comply.

This document presents TNO-ESI’s Vision on System Qualities Reasoning for the Dutch high tech equipment industry. It is written for industry leaders, system architects, R&D strategists, and researchers who need to understand how system qualities such as productivity, energy efficiency, resource usage, and cost can be systematically engineered across increasingly complex, interconnected, and software-defined systems.

Synthesis based engineering (SBE) is an approach in which supervisor synthesis is utilized to automatically generate a correct-by-construction supervisor for a cyber-physical system. The Eclipse Supervisory Control Engineering Toolkit (ESCET—) project develops a state-of-the-art toolkit supporting the entire SBE workflow mainly through the CIF language and tools.

This project investigates the application of Synthesis-Based Engineering (SBE) to the TNO Embedded Systems Innovation (TNO-ESI) demo system, a modular cyber-physical training factory. The objective is to demonstrate the power of SBE in the development of industrial control software by automatically synthesizing correct-by-construction supervisory controllers from formal specifications.

The high-tech manufacturing industry, dominated by large multinational corporations, faces pressure to innovate faster to remain competitive, producing more sophisticated machines with better performance and quality. In recent years, besides the push for better performance, sustainability and circularity have also gained importance, due to (1) regulations that are becoming broader in scope, stricter in thresholds, and more complex in requirements, (2) customer demands and expectations and (3) internal strategic objectives.

High-tech systems are growing more complex due to mass customization, integration of diverse technologies, and long lifecycle demands. Customers increasingly expect service contracts based on performance and availability, yet diagnostics remain largely reactive and reliant on human expertise. This position paper proposes a Pervasive Intelligent Diagnostics (PID) framework that integrates pervasive sensing, model-based digital twins, and hybrid AI for predictive diagnostics and sustainable lifecycle management.

In most systems of systems ecosystems, there is a significant number of challenges in the digital information streams between organizations and within organizations. This paper gives a retrospective analysis on the current situation to identify the major bottlenecks. It limits itself to diagnosing the current situation with the purpose that future research can address a roadmap to address the current problems.

To meet the goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, the Netherlands must scale its electricity grid by a factor of five. Limited building space, a lengthy process to obtain building permits and shortage of skilled labor pose a major constraint. This paper explores how modular building, embedded within a Systems Engineering (SE) and Product Line Engineering (PLE) approach, can help accelerate electricity grid extension, and, ultimately, the energy transition.