Scientific publications

In this short paper I will address the question whether the methods and techniques we develop are applied well in industrial practice. To address this question, I will make a few observations from the academic field, as well as from industrial practice. This will be followed by a concise analysis of the cause of the perceived gap between the academic state-of-the-art and industrial practice.

The ever increasing performance gap between processors and memories is one of the biggest performance bottlenecks for computer systems. In this paper, we propose a task scheduling technique that schedules an application, modeled with a task graph, on a multiprocessor system-onchip (MPSoC) that contains a limited on-chip memory.

Synchronous dataflow graphs (SDFGs) are widely used to model streaming applications such as signal processing and multimedia applications in embedded systems. Trade-off analysis between performance and resource usage of SDFGs allows designers to explore implementation alternatives of a system while meeting its performance requirements and resource constraints.

Model-based testing is one of the promising technologies to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of software testing. In modelbased testing, a model specifies the required behaviour of a system, and test cases are algorithmically generated from this model. Obtaining a valid model, however, is often difficult if the system is complex, contains legacy or third-party components, or if documentation is incomplete.

Model-driven Design-Space Exploration (DSE) for embedded systems has proven to speed up system design and improve quality. Parameterized Partial Orders (PPOs) are a simple yet powerful conservative extension of classical partial orders. They serve as an intermediate representation in our Octopus toolset, allowing to capture applications from different domains and enabling analysis with various tools.

Dataflow formalisms are useful for specifying signal processing and streaming applications. To adequately capture the dynamic aspects of modern applications, the formalism of Scenario-Aware Dataflow (SADF) was recently introduced, which allows analysis of worst/best-case and average-case performance across different modes of operation (scenarios).

Embedded control is a key product technology differentiator for many high-tech industries, including ASML. The strong increase in complexity of embedded control systems, combined with the occurrence of late changes in control requirements, results in many timing performance problems showing up only during the integration phase.

Embedded multimedia and wireless applications require a model-based design approach in order to satisfy stringent quality and cost constraints. The Model-of-Computation (MoC) should appropriately capture system dynamics, support analysis and synthesis, and allow low-overhead model-driven implementations.

The systems being developed by the high-tech industry do not operate in isolation. They are combined with other systems to provide value to their owners. This report is concerned with an important type of systems of systems of which high-tech systems are a part, namely manufacturing systems (of systems).