Scientific publications

To improve the design of a power control unit at Philips, two Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) have been used. The first DSL provides a concise and readable notation for the essential state transitions. It is used to generate both configuration files and analysis models. In addition, we also generate instances of a second DSL which represents test traces.

Software maintenance consumes a significant and increasing proportion of industrial software engineering budgets, only to maintain the existing product functionality. This hinders the development of new innovative features with added value to customers. To make software development efforts more effective, legacy software needs to be rejuvenated into a substantial redesign.

Performance is a key aspect of many embedded systems, embedded data processing systems in particular. System performance can typically only be measured in the later stages of system development. To avoid expensive re-work in the final stages of development, it is essential to have accurate performance estimations in the early stages.

Using ITS data without understanding its quality is questionable. The QSRTI method has been created by TNO on behalf of the Dutch Road Authority (RWS) in response to the European ITS action plan [1]. To reduce the number of road accidents and enhancing traffic efficiency, the European Commission has formulated a priority action in this ITS action plan, known as action C: "Data and procedures for the provision, where possible, of road safety related minimum universal traffic information free of charge to users".

In our mission to advance innovation by industrial adoption of academic results, we perform many projects with high-tech industries. Favoring formal methods, we observe a gap between industrial needs in performance modeling and the analysis capabilities of formal methods for this goal. After clarifying this gap, we highlight some relevant deficiencies for state-of-the-art quantitative analysis techniques (focusing on model checking and simulation).

System designers need to have insight in the response times of service systems to see if they meet performance requirements. We present a high-level evaluation technique to obtain the distribution of services completion times. It is based on a high-level domain-specific language that hides the underlying technicalities from the system designer.

Abstract Probabilistic logics combine the expressive power of logic with the ability to reason with uncertainty. Several probabilistic logic languages have been proposed in the past, each of them with their own features. We focus on a class of probabilistic logic based on Sato's distribution semantics, which extends logic programming with probability distributions on binary random variables and guarantees a unique probability distribution.

Modern lighting systems are configurable systems-of-systems that have to operate in an environment that they cannot fully control. These systems have to guarantee the continuation of their functionality regardless of the events in their environment. As testing and simulation are not able to identify all possible interactions of a lighting system and its environment we propose a model checking approach to analyze a lighting system’s robustness.

Cost-effective mobile healthcare must consider not only technological performance but also the division of responsibilities between the patient and care provider, the context of the patient’s condition, and ways to implement patient decision support and tailored interaction.

Deliver “actionable” intelligence instead of just raw information – this is what the Metis research project pursues for supporting operational work in domains characterized by constantly evolving situations with a diversity of entities, complex interactions and high-level uncertainty in the information gathered.