Scientific publications

Many companies struggle with large amounts of legacy software that is difficult to maintain and to extend. Refactoring legacy code typically requires large efforts and introduces serious risks because often crucial business assets are hidden in legacy components. We investigate the support of formal techniques for the rejuvenation of legacy embedded software, concentrating on control components.

Two Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) have been developed to improve the development of a power control component of interventional X-ray systems of Philips. Configuration files and test cases are generated from instances of these DSLs. To increase the confidence in these instances and the generators, formal models have been generated to analyse DSL instances and to crosscheck the results of the generators.

Synchronous dataflow graphs (SDFGs) are widely used to represent digital signal processing algorithms and streaming media applications. This paper presents several methods for binding and scheduling SDFGs on a multiprocessor platform. Exploring the state space generated by a self-timed execution (STE) of an SDFG, we present an exact method for static rate-optimal scheduling of SDFGs via implicit retiming and unfolding.

Development of high-level supervisory controllers is an important challenge in the design of high-tech systems. It has become a significant issue due to increased complexity, combined with demands for verified quality, time to market, ease of development, and integration of new functionality. To deal with these challenges, model-based engineering approaches are suggested as a cost-effective way to support easy adaptation, validation, synthesis, and verification of controllers.

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) play an important role in the modern high-tech industry. Designing such systems is a challenging task due to the multi-disciplinary nature of these systems, and the range of abstraction levels involved. To facilitate hands-on experience with such systems, we develop a cyber-physical platform that aids in research and education on CPS.

Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) provide a lightweight approach to incorporate formal techniques into the industrial workflow. From DSL instances, formal models and other artefacts can be generated, such as simulation models and code. Having a single source for all artefacts improves maintenance and offers a high return on investment of the initial modelling effort.

This work proposes a Multi-Constraint Resource Allocation (MuCoRA) method for applications from multiple domains onto multi-processors. In particular, we address a mapping problem for multiple throughput-constrained streaming applications and multiple latency-constrained feedback control applications onto a multi-processor platform running under a Time-Division Multiple-Access (TDMA) policy.

Service-oriented systems are designed for interconnecting with other systems. The provided services face timing constraints, the so-called latencies. We present a high-level performance evaluation technique that can be used by a system designer to obtain distributions of these latencies. This technique is capable of capturing nondeterministic, probabilistic and real-time aspects in one go.

Cross-technology interference on the license-free ISM bands has a major negative effect on the performance of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Channel hopping has been adopted in the Time-Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) mode of IEEE 802.15.4e to eliminate blocking of wireless links caused by external interference on some frequency channels.

The development and use of computerized decision-support systems in the domain of breast cancer has the potential to facilitate the early detection of diseaseas well as spare healthy women unnecessary interventions. Despite encouraging trends, there is much room for improvement in the capabilities of such systems tofurther alleviate the burden of breast cancer.