Benny Akesson

Functie:
Senior Scientist at TNO and Professor at the University of Amsterdam on Design Methodologies for Cyber-physical Systems

Benny Akesson is a Senior Research Fellow at TNO, where he conducts applied research in projects related to system evolvability and system performance. His research interest include model-based engineering and real-time systems. Since 2019, he is a Professor by Special Appointment at the University of Amsterdam, where he holds the Chair of Design Methodologies for Cyber-physical systems.

Professorship chair

Design Methodologies for Cyber-physical systems (University of Amsterdam).

Research area

Cyber-physical systems across application domains are getting increasingly complex, driven by five technological and market trends:

  1. all current design parameters, e.g. number of interfaces, are increasing by an order of magnitude,
  2. increased customization of systems at design time,
  3. continuous evolution of systems after deployment,
  4. increased system autonomy, and
  5. integration into distributed systems-of-systems.

The consequences of increasing complexity are visible in daily practice in which Dutch industry struggles to efficiently develop correct and well-performing cyber-physical systems.

In line with TNOs goal to increase competitiveness of Dutch industry, my research aims to address increasing complexity through new model-based design methodologies. These are methodologies in which abstraction, provided by models used for specification, communication, analysis, simulation, or synthesis, play an essential role in reducing development time and overall system cost.

A key part of this research is to investigate how models can be used to automatically generate parts of complex systems that are guaranteed to provide the specified functionality at exactly the right time. For example, to ensure that an airbag immediately inflates correctly in the event of a car crash, which requires both correct and timely interactions between hardware and software.

Top publications

  • Akesson, B., Nasri, M., Nelissen, G. et al. “A comprehensive survey of industry practice in real-time systems”, Real-Time Systems, Volume 58, 2022
  • Akesson B., J. Hooman, J. Sleuters, et al., “Reducing Design Time and Promoting Evolvability using Domain-specific Languages in an Industrial Context”, Chapter Model Management and Analytics for Large Scale Systems, 2019
  • Minaeva, B. Akesson, Z. Hanzalek , et al., ” Time-Triggered Co-Scheduling of Computation and Communication with Jitter Requirements”, Journal IEEE Transactions on Computers, Volume 67, Number 1, 2018

Eindhoven - High Tech Campus 25

High Tech Campus 25
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The Netherlands

Postal address

P.O. Box 6235
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The Netherlands