Mathias Funk

 

Self-observing Systems

 

The position is part of the “Managing Soft Reliability in Strongly Innovative Product Creation Processes” IOP project* which has the goal to control causes of soft reliability problems in technical and end-user terms as well as in terms of (information flows in-) business processes. The project involves three other PhDs from Technology Management and Industrial Design at the TU/e.

The project will provide a method and a set of corresponding models for the analysis and management of Soft Reliability Problems that can be used as integral part of the product creation process of highly innovative products like professional office products or multimedia consumer products. The project addresses an important bottleneck that prevents technically feasible products from being accepted and appreciated by customers in the market.

Since one single customer complaint can have many causes inside the product methods will be developed to allow non-intrusive data logging inside the products analysed during this project. These trails will concentrate not only on the internal architecture of a system but especially on the parts of a system that interact with the outside world. This is in contrast with the traditional tracing techniques; most traditional tracing techniques (also known as debugging) concentrate on finding deviations from the formal specification during execution. This sub-project will focus especially on finding discrepancies between customer requirements and specifications and therefore a stronger focus on the product interfaces is expected. The ambition is that these activities should lead to methods that generate SRP related data early in the product creation process and within the time constraints of modern industrial product creation processes.

Currently I’m working on the general theme of self-observing products and their possible usage in various scenarios. While engaging in the design and architectural aspects of such systems, I’m also concerned with their implementation into several real-life cases, the generalization of requirements that might arise in the application areas of this technique. Thinking goes into the direction of an integrated development process by using UML-based tools as well as model transformation and weaving to achieve a seamless integration of the observation aspect which is in most cases cross-cutting through the whole host system. On the other hand this “from-scratch” approach cannot be applied to nowadays products and product development process to I also want to find a way to smoothly introduce observation into already existing systems. Regarding this, case studies will be done together with the participating companies.

*This work is being carried out as part of the “Soft Reliability” project, sponsored by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs under the IOP-IPCR program.