Scientific publications

The target of the Vraaggestuurde Programma (VP) ESI is to drive advances in high-tech systems development by embedding cutting-edge engineering methodologies in the Dutch high-tech systems industry to cope with the ever-increasing complexity of their products: (i) creating impactful and industrially applicable methodologies and (ii) providing support to the high-tech industry to apply the results.

Model-Based Systems Engineering (called MBSE) promises streamlined communication, single-source information sharing, design automation, and tool support, which leads to improved project performance. It includes de-risking integration challenges, when sub-systems are combined for the future integration into a system-of-systems (SoS).

Switching max-plus linear system (SMPLS) models are an apt formalism for performance analysis of discrete-event systems. SMPLS analysis is more scalable than analysis through other formalisms such as timed automata, because SMPLS abstract pieces of determinate concurrent system behavior into atomic modes with fixed timing.

Companies operate invariably in an ecosystem of suppliers and competitors. For such companies, business strategies require a careful product portfolio positioning on basis of market differentiators. Relating business strategy to consequences on product architectures and components requires due-diligence analysis on how products function and their essential qualities in relation to the market differentiators looked for.

Model-based testing (MBT) offers the possibility of automatic generation and execution of tests. However, it is not yet widely used in industry due to the difficulty in creating and maintaining models. On the other hand, Behavior Driven Development (BDD) is becoming more popular in the agile development process to achieve a common understanding of the system under development among stakeholders and to automate testing.

The Eclipse Supervisory Control Engineering Toolkit (ESCETTM) is an open-source project to provide a model-based approach and toolkit for developing supervisory controllers , targeting their entire engineering process. It supports synthesis-based engineering of supervisory controllers for discrete-event systems, combining model-based engineering with computer-aided design to automatically generate correct-constructioncontrollers.

Market trends show advanced usage of safetycritical systems with novel services based on smart data analytics. Customers require continuous updates to applications and services and seek lower costs, and easy-to-install solutions (maintenance) for safety-critical cyber-physical systems (CPS). Leveraging edge and cloud technologies has the potential to enhance safety-critical CPS, also in regulated environments.

Product family development facilitates reuse across all phases of systems engineering; in case of model-based systems engineering, this reuse involves the models as well. Introducing a model-based way of working is challenging, especially for product family development. This paper describes a case of introducing a modelbased way of working in brown-field product family development.

Streaming systems are naturally modeled with synchronous dataflow graphs (SDFGs). The max-plus semantics of an SDFG is a compact matrix representation of its timing behavior. The max-plus semantics enables us to analyze and control timing properties of the systems, such as the obtainable minimum guaranteed throughput and maximum latency.

Context: Execution logs capture the run-time behavior of software systems. To assist developers in their maintenance tasks, many studies have proposed tools to analyze execution information from logs. However, it is as yet unknown how industry developers use logs in embedded software engineering. Objective: In this study, we aim to understand how developers use logs in an embedded software engineering context.