• Scientist Software Architecture

Internship

• Diagnosis of machine control application behaviour

• Ensuring backwards compatability: detection and correction of incompatible interfaces

Making high-tech systems software architectures futureproof by applying systematic methods to derive the software structure from the complex system needs. Can you picture it? Contribute to the world of tomorrow as a scientist at the Eindhoven-based ESI (TNO).

What will you be doing?

You will have the unique opportunity to make an impact where software meets system design. Over time many high-tech companies have evolved their equipment into software intense systems. As their equipment becomes more sophisticated, so does the complexity of the software. So, what you and your colleagues have to do is: learn to understand what drives the system architecture and design, and how to translate these insights into component-based evolvable software architectures which are able to deal with the ever-more demanding system evolution. This will make it easier for large industrial players in the future to develop structured state-of-the-art software.

As a scientist operating from industry labs at high-tech giants, you bridge the gap between academia and industrial practice. Your share insights that you gain during your research with industrial partners and science. As you often work in a small team, you have an important say in the course of the project. We look forward to hearing your ideas.

The research projects you can contribute to from ESI (TNO) are numerous. For example, your colleagues helped Thermo Fisher Scientific with automated tools to gain deep insight in their legacy code base to clean it up and to make it future-proof. They also demonstrated an effective approach for software interface modelling and automatic test case generation with ComMA in cooperation with several of our partners and we plan to work on methodologies for modelling complete software architectures. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. So, plenty of options!

You will participate in a strategic research team, working in one of the ESI research projects, where you will adapt and extend the features of the ComMA tooling for the specification and analysis of component interfaces. Most of the time the research team is working on the customer premises.

Based on a ComMA interface specification (Xtext), a large number of artefacts are generated such as Simulators in Java, Analysis of Interface models (Xtend), Stubs and Test generation (C++/C#). Experimentation with new tooling and concepts for conformance checking and impact analysis (Python) is part of the assignment.

Furthermore, general maintenance and improvements are needed to prepare for an open source version of ComMA.

Requirements

You have a relevant professional background in software development and several years of experience with model-based development in industry. Important for the improvement of ComMA features is good knowledge of Eclipse-based development of plugins, using Xtext, Xtend and Java. You have good design, coding and debugging skills.

You are a goal oriented, self-driven professional with a strong will to deliver quality results. Above all you are a good problem solver and a good team player. You enjoy working in a multidisciplinary team of ESI research fellows, industrial and academic partners, where you closely cooperate with the customer’s product development team at the customer premises.

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.

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