ICT Open 2025

Engineering the Future: Addressing System Complexity in High-Tech Equipment

The Netherlands has a vibrant high-tech equipment industry in application domains including semiconductors, medical systems, and defense. Many companies in this industry are world-leading in their respective market segments and contribute significantly to the Dutch economy. However, this industry is challenged by a number of market and technology trends that result in increasing system complexity, driving up development and maintenance costs. To enable future systems to be developed cost-efficiently, new engineering methodologies are required to address the increasing complexity.

This keynote will explore the trends contributing to the rising system complexity and present promising research directions to tackle this challenge. Addressing this will require a concerted effort from academia, applied research organizations, and industry, working together in an innovation chain. We will showcase collaborative research led by TNO-ESI and its ecosystem of academic and industry partners, illustrating how joint innovation can pave the way for cost-efficient development of future systems.

The high-tech equipment industry faces challenges to master an ever-increasing system complexity in response to pressing market demands for functionality, customization, evolvability, autonomy, security, smartness, and sustainability. Complexity also increases in response to emerging new technologies, e.g., AI. This growing complexity affects all phases of system development, from early architecting to implementation, verification, and evolution. It also affects the whole system life cycle, including its usage and disposal, which, in turn, influence the system design. Failure to manage this complexity can lead to errors, delays, and cost overruns for companies, impacting the leading position of the Dutch high-tech equipment industry and, ultimately, the country's earning capacity. The problem is exacerbated by a shortage of skilled people, requiring a substantial boost in engineers' productivity over the next decade to allow the efficient development of next-generation systems. This boost cannot happen without new engineering methodologies guiding, automating, and optimizing all the system architecting, design, and maintenance phases.