You will be part of a small team within one of several public/private funded applied research projects in close collaboration with industrial partners. These projects focus on the exploration, development and practical validation of innovative systems architecting methods in high-tech systems. You will do applied research in the context of concrete and business-critical challenges in multidisciplinary industrial R&D projects of highly complex, digital-intensive systems and applications. You will work closely with the stakeholders from the industry and with ESI colleagues, addressing the opportunities and challenges of using model-based systems architecting and systems engineering methodologies. It is our aim to make the industry more effective and efficient, by developing and embedding such methodologies in cooperation with an industrial partner and to advance the architecting capabilities of all industrial partners in our network by transferring knowledge and ways-of-working to their (future) system architects.

You will be part of the system architecting expertise team of ESI and develop model-based methodologies for systems architecting and systems engineering. You will be challenged to develop and apply architecting methods for reasoning about the relation between customer and stakeholder values, architectural concepts and technologies, in the context of high-tech industrial processes, organizational structures and business needs.

You will do so “on the R&D floor” of our industrial partners, as you will be participating in a variety of applied research projects in close cooperation with product development teams of the industrial partners of ESI, at their premises. In these projects, you will both solve challenges of our high-tech industrial partners and contribute to the goal of ESI to develop and embed model-based methodologies for systems architecting and systems engineering.

Your responsibilities may also include coordinating the work of master and/or PhD students and of industrial engineers, as well as coordinating software engineering activities to professionalize the modeling tools developed by ESI.

Do you want to contribute to the analysis and transformation chains from legacy software to well-structured state-of-the-art software? We address the ever-increasing complexity the high-tech industry is facing. Are you joining us?

What will you be doing?

You will form part of a small team within one of several public / private funded applied research projects in close collaboration with industrial partners. The projects focus on cost-effective, (semi-) automated techniques and methods for handling the growing complexity of industrial legacy software. The general objective is to extract models for better human understanding of the structure and functionality, and to reduce the overall software complexity. Your role will be to contribute to the development, application and evaluation of practical techniques and methods based on industrial study cases. Our objective is to create and demonstrate full analysis and transformation chains from legacy software to well-structured state-of-the-art software. This should improve the overall professional quality and capabilities of the industrial product, and significantly reduce future development and maintenance efforts. By closely cooperating with your colleagues, you will be able to build on the methods already developed within ESI (TNO).

The developed analysis and transformation principles will be applicable to industrial cases of multiple ESI (TNO) partners, who act in diverse domains (including for example healthcare). You are open to share your experiences and knowledge with industrial partners, present gained insights and, whenever relevant, publish results at scientific conferences. Your future responsibilities include coordination with other professionals, such as PhD students and industrial engineers, guiding them successfully through their innovation challenges.

What will you be doing?

You will form part of a small team within one of several public / private funded applied research projects in close collaboration with industrial partners. The project focuses on system-wide understanding of the impact of legacy software components behaviour by relearning their interfaces. The general objective is to establish better (formalized) interface contracts which can be utilized in various ways to reduce the overall complexity of the software architecture and its development. Your role will be to contribute to the development of practical model inference methodologies which aim at inter-component behavioural aspects. By closely cooperating with your colleagues, you will be able to build on the methods already developed within ESI (TNO).

The developed model-inference principles will be applicable to industrial cases of multiple ESI (TNO) partners, who act in diverse domains (including for example healthcare). You are open to share your experiences and knowledge with industrial partners, present gained insights and, whenever relevant, publish results at scientific conferences. Your future responsibilities include coordination of other professionals, such as PhD students and industrial engineers, guiding them successfully through their innovation challenges.

Diagnosis of Machine Control Application Behaviour

The Machinaide project is a cooperation of TNO and Cordis Automation, Additive Industries, Lely, TU/e and KE-works. The project addresses knowledge-based services for and optimisation of machines. To achieve this goal, Machinaide aims at the development of digital twins of machine control applications.

What will you be doing?

Cyber-physical systems with long life times need to continuously evolve after deployment in response to changing technology and business needs. Lacking this ability not only prevents systems from quickly reacting to these changes, but also increases risk, as many small updates are collected into big infrequent upgrades. Service-oriented software architectures support continuous evolution by decoupling the application from a particular product, technology, and implementation using service interfaces that hide the component implementing the service. However, this arrangement results in a large number of possible interactions between different components and versions, making it difficult and time-consuming to detect and correct structural and behavioral incompatibilities caused by updating service interfaces. Automation is hence required to detect and correct incompatibilities, such as different message structures and protocol mismatches, when a service interface is updated.

Ensuring backwards compatibility: Detection and Correction of Incompatible Service Interfaces

Airplanes, trains or ships have long life times and need to continuously evolve after deployment. You will be part of a research team researching solutions enabling fast responses to changing technology and business needs.

What will you be doing?

Cyber-physical systems with long life times need to continuously evolve after deployment in response to changing technology and business needs. Lacking this ability not only prevents systems from quickly reacting to these changes, but also increases risk, as many small updates are collected into big infrequent upgrades. Service-oriented software architectures support continuous evolution by decoupling the application from a particular product, technology, and implementation using service interfaces that hide the component implementing the service. However, this arrangement results in a large number of possible interactions between different components and versions, making it difficult and time-consuming to detect and correct structural and behavioral incompatibilities caused by updating service interfaces. Automation is hence required to detect and correct incompatibilities, such as different message structures and protocol mismatches, when a service interface is updated.

Overview