Publications

This report introduces a methodology for diagnosing performance issues in high-tech production systems. The approach uses probabilistic graphical models to combine machine data with expert and design knowledge. By reasoning across multiple representations of the data, multiple resolutions, and across time, the approach can interpret defectivity patterns and infer their actionable root causes.

Actuator faults greatly affect the performance and stability of control systems, an issue that is even more critical for systems required to operate autonomously under adverse environmental conditions, such as unmanned vehicles. To this end, passive fault-tolerant control (PFTC) systems can be employed, namely fixed-gain control laws that guarantee stability both in the nominal case and in the event of faults.

Software systems often depend on third-party components, such as libraries and frameworks. When these components become deprecated, maintenance is required to ensure the continued functionality of these systems. In this paper, we present a case study at ASML, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of chip-making equipment, involving the deprecation of a UI framework, which necessitated the transpilation of part of anindustrial code base from C to Python.

Controller synthesis for cyber-physical systems is a powerful technique to ensure safe and correct behavior, yet its application in industrial settings remains limited. Its adoption is hindered by practical issues, such as the lack of specialized tooling, unfamiliar specification languages, and modeling paradigms that differ from engineers’ established workflows.

Supervisory controllers are crucial for industrial cyber-physical systems to ensure their safe and efficient operations. Correct-by-construction supervisory controllers can automatically be generated from requirements using supervisory controller synthesis. Whilst formal synthesis techniques are well-established, their applications in real-world systems often suffer from scalability challenges.

When performing supervisory controller synthesis using the ESCET toolkit, a user has no indication of how long the algorithm will take before it terminates. In fact, a user does not know whether they should wait until it finishes, or if they should try again using different settings. In this master thesis, we explore the symbolic computations used in the synthesis algorithm to determine when a set of settings produces a bad run of the algorithm.

Interfaces play a central role in determining compatible component compositions by prescribing permissible interactions between a service provider (server) and its consumers (clients). The high degree of concurrency in asynchronous communicating systems increases the risk of unintentionally introducing deadlocks and livelocks.

This report shares the learnings of TNO-ESI and Vanderlande on architecting cyber-physical systems. It is the final result of the SecureArch project. The purpose of architecting is to generate system architecture alternatives, and select the most effective one(s), for guiding the design process in defining a solution that can be realised.

To maximize performance in modern production environments, there is a trend toward integrating multiple systems from different vendors into production lines. Scheduling work in such lines requires careful coordination of the machines' operational states. Achieving optimal schedules involves considering the duration of operations, travel, and sequence-dependent setup - factors that are critical in a high-mix low-volume (HMLV) setting due to the variability in job requirements.

One of the goals of the CareFree 2025 project has been the development of a methodology that connects Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) to diagnostics, which is the process of identifying faulty hardware components in case of a system failure. For this purpose, we started with a methodology developed earlier in de SD2Act project, and applied it to a large and complex module in a realistic industrial system: a high-volume printer developed by Canon Production Printing.