Publications

For industry, including high-tech manufacturing industry and OEMs, it is foreseeable that new regulations will be stricter on environmental sustainability and circularity indicators. The cus-tomers (who are businesses themselves) will face the same regulations and will therefore increasingly push their suppliers to comply.

This document presents TNO-ESI’s Vision on System Qualities Reasoning for the Dutch high tech equipment industry. It is written for industry leaders, system architects, R&D strategists, and researchers who need to understand how system qualities such as productivity, energy efficiency, resource usage, and cost can be systematically engineered across increasingly complex, interconnected, and software-defined systems.

Synthesis based engineering (SBE) is an approach in which supervisor synthesis is utilized to automatically generate a correct-by-construction supervisor for a cyber-physical system. The Eclipse Supervisory Control Engineering Toolkit (ESCET—) project develops a state-of-the-art toolkit supporting the entire SBE workflow mainly through the CIF language and tools.

This project investigates the application of Synthesis-Based Engineering (SBE) to the TNO Embedded Systems Innovation (TNO-ESI) demo system, a modular cyber-physical training factory. The objective is to demonstrate the power of SBE in the development of industrial control software by automatically synthesizing correct-by-construction supervisory controllers from formal specifications.

The high-tech manufacturing industry, dominated by large multinational corporations, faces pressure to innovate faster to remain competitive, producing more sophisticated machines with better performance and quality. In recent years, besides the push for better performance, sustainability and circularity have also gained importance, due to (1) regulations that are becoming broader in scope, stricter in thresholds, and more complex in requirements, (2) customer demands and expectations and (3) internal strategic objectives.

High-tech systems are growing more complex due to mass customization, integration of diverse technologies, and long lifecycle demands. Customers increasingly expect service contracts based on performance and availability, yet diagnostics remain largely reactive and reliant on human expertise. This position paper proposes a Pervasive Intelligent Diagnostics (PID) framework that integrates pervasive sensing, model-based digital twins, and hybrid AI for predictive diagnostics and sustainable lifecycle management.

To meet the goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, the Netherlands must scale its electricity grid by a factor of five. Limited building space, a lengthy process to obtain building permits and shortage of skilled labor pose a major constraint. This paper explores how modular building, embedded within a Systems Engineering (SE) and Product Line Engineering (PLE) approach, can help accelerate electricity grid extension, and, ultimately, the energy transition.

The high tech equipment industry in the Netherlands develops cyber physical systems that are increasingly enabled by software. The interplay between Systems Engineering (SE) and Software Engineering (SWE) remains persistently problematic. Organisations report recurring symptoms such as integration issues, emergent behaviour problems, rework, delays, and budget overruns.

This document outlines the TNO-ESI vision and strategic direction for research and development in the area of systems of systems, focused on the high-tech equipment industry. A system-of-systems (SoS) is a large-scale, non-monolithic, distributed, heterogeneous system, built from multiple interacting constituent systems (CS), which are independently operating systems themselves.

This report examines the challenge of strengthening and formalizing a Software Maintenance and Evolution (SMEvo) ecosystem for the Dutch high-tech industry. Maintenance and evolution of long-lived, software-intensive systems account for a large part, estimated between 75% and 90%, of software lifecycle costs.