Publications

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.

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.

We are currently confronted with a trend of increased pressure on health care, with associated increasing financial costs, due to an aging society and the expected increase in the prevalence of disability and chronic disease. Finding measures for cost reduction, without sacrificing quality of care, is a significant healthcare challenge.

General purpose platforms are characterized by unpredictable timing behavior. Real-time schedules of tasks on general purpose platforms need to be robust against variations in task execution times. We define robustness in terms of the expected number of tasks that miss deadlines. We present an iterative robust scheduler that produces robust multiprocessor schedules of directed acyclic graphs with a low expected number of tasks that miss their deadlines.

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.

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.

Online detection and tracking of a variable number of faces in video is a crucial component in many real-world applications ranging from video-surveillance to online gaming. In this paper we propose FAST-DT, a fully automated system capable of detecting and tracking a variable number of faces online without relying on any scene-specific cues.

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.