External projects

About this position

A key objective in production systems is to maximize productivity, for example maximizing the number of products produced per hour. This implies that typically, actions in the system should be executed as soon as the required resource is available. However, there are sometimes also situations where actions should not be executed as soon as possible. For example, in a pizzeria, the cook should only start baking a pizza when he knows that a delivery person is available the moment that it is ready. You don't want to get a cold pizza when starting the weekend.

What will be your role?

LSAT (Logistics Specification and Analysis Tool) is a tool that can be used to specify and analyze production systems. Systems are modeled in a lightweight way in terms of the system resources, the system behavior and timing characteristics. The tool provides various visualizations to explore the controlled system behavior. It also provides techniques to analyze and optimize system productivity.

Currently, LSAT does not provide the possibility to model and analyze actions that need to happen just-in-time and need to conform to deadlines. You can specify that action A is followed by action B, but you cannot yet enforce that A should be delayed to ensure that it ends right before B starts. This means that currently, we cannot model and analyze situations like the pizzeria example. In this assignment we want to investigate how LSAT can be extended in this direction. We have two industrial use case domains (wafer handling and production printing) that require this extension, and that can be used to validate the solution.

What we expect from you

You are an MSc student Electrical Engineering, Computer Science or Embedded Systems looking for a graduation assignment of 6-9 months. You have an interest in model-based development, preferably knowledge of domain-specific languages and model transformations. You think it is a challenge to work in a multi-disciplinary environment and like your graduation assignment to show the benefits of scientific system development methods in a high-tech organization.

What you'll get in return

You want to work on the precursor of your career; a work placement gives you an opportunity to take a good look at your prospective future employer. TNO goes a step further. It’s not just looking that interests us; you and your knowledge are essential to our innovation. That’s why we attach a great deal of value to your personal and professional development. You will, of course, be properly supervised during your work placement and be given the scope for you to get the best out of yourself. Naturally, we provide suitable work placement compensation.

For the full description, and to apply for this internship, see: https://www.tno.nl/en/careers/vacancies/2023/12/internship-modeling-analysis-deadlines/

At TNO, there are various opportunities for doing your final project, for example in the area of

• control for adaptive autonomous distributed systems,
• real-time debugging for distributed microservice chains,
• explainability of machine learning,
• using machine learning for sensor configuration.

An overview of all available internship vacancies at TNO is given here.

The Research Center of Info Support offers you the opportunity to graduate at a scientific level within the framework of our IT practice.

Info Support is a leading software company that makes high-end custom technology solutions for companies in the fintech, health, energy, public transport and agritech sectors. We work with a talented team of 500 engineers embracing an agile mindset and software craftmanship. We are proud to have awarded distinguished engineers in the field of AI, software architecture, open source, Java, .NET, cloud and agile, speaking at tech conferences around the world. Furthermore we are supporting the developer community by contributing at several open source initiatives.

Our Research Ambitions: Ambitions are research questions of which the answers will give us the opportunity to determine the future. After that we present the research assignments that we came up with, with research questions that you could answer in your master thesis assignment.

Our Master Thesis subjects & Ambitions: Our master thesis assignments are divided into two separate subjects:

• Artificial Intelligence
• Software Architecture

Discover our research assignments examples in Artificial Intelligence and Software Architecture and learn more about graduating at Info Support and our Research Center on masterthesisatinfosupport.com.