Inaugural presentation Benny Akesson, UvA
Date: May 26, 2023
Venue: Auditorium University of Amsterdam, Oude Lutherse kerk, Amsterdam
In case you cannot be present, you can view the livestream.
We are excited to announce the inaugural presentation of Prof.dr. A. Akesson, Professor Design Methodologies for Cyber-Physical Systems at the University of Amsterdam.
The chair was designated on behalf of TNO (The Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research).
Managing Complexity in High-tech Systems
The Netherlands has a vibrant high-tech industry with many large companies, such as Philips, ASML, and Vanderlande, just to name a few, that are world leaders in their respective markets. Not only are such companies a national pride of the Netherlands, much like cheese and tulips, they also create jobs, contribute considerably to the Dutch economy, and their products improve the lives of many people. For example, consider the x-ray machines that improve our healthcare, lithography machines that make our computer chips, and baggage handling systems that help our luggage reach our holiday destinations. Although these high-tech systems are all very different, they all experience increasing system complexity that makes every new generation of systems more challenging, costly, and time-consuming to develop than the previous. Why is this happening and how can we help this industry stay innovative?
This presentation explains why system complexity is increasing in high-tech systems. It also argues that managing this increase requires universities, applied research organizations, like TNO, and industry to strategically work together to research new and better ways to develop systems, transfer them to industry, and teach them to students. We explain how the system development process can be improved by giving models a central role. Models are a simpler, more abstract, description of parts of a system, such as its functionality, performance, or energy consumption. Such descriptions can be used to create a comprehensible overview of a complex system, but can also be used for analysis, e.g. to help engineers choose between different design options, as well as to automatically create documentation, program code, and tests, to reduce development time. If the systems are too complex for engineers to model manually, models have to be automatically created from data collected from the systems, further pushing the boundaries of automation in the battle against system complexity.