Hans Vangheluwe full professor

Research Hans Vangheluwe

Research team

Expertise

Modelling and simulation, in particular of Cyber-Physical Systems. Both discrete-event (DEVS) and continuous-time (Modelica). Model transformation, Domain-Specific Languages.

FlexIA – Flexible Industrial Automation. 01/05/2024 - 30/04/2025

Abstract

In the past, industrial automation predominantly relied on Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), offering an unparalleled reliability in controlling a wide range of manufacturing processes. The demand for increased efficiency, adaptability, and intelligent decision-making has propelled the integration of advanced algorithms in industrial automation projects. This shift towards such promising software-intensive automation poses some challenges. First, the integration of advanced algorithms, such as artificial intelligence (AI) models, with legacy installed automation infrastructures hits its limits when implemented in closed software-hardware ecosystems. Technology suppliers constrain their customers within the boundaries of their proprietary tools and hardware, thereby limiting hardware-software flexibility. Second, vendor-specific solutions do not support code reuse across different software-hardware suppliers, also called vendor lock-in. This results in costly redesigns when transitioning to different hardware platforms. The primary goal of the FlexIA Proof-of-Concept (PoC) project is to provide true hardware-software flexibility for the development of software-intensive automation systems by introducing the develop once, deploy anywhere strategy. This will be facilitated by developing and commercializing the FlexIA platform, a vendor-agnostic toolkit for developing and deploying software-intensive automation systems. The platform enables the creation and management of complex automation applications regardless of whether the hardware is realized on PLC or microcontroller. This contributes to the secondary goal of the project, namely reducing the vendor lock-in. Primary valorisation goal of this FlexIA PoC project is to conduct a thorough market study to determine the current and future needs of the relevant industrial stakeholders. This market study will help to determine an optimal go-to-market strategy to successfully commercialize the FlexIA platform. At the same time, it aligns the FlexIA technology features with the needs of the different stakeholders.

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  • Research Project

Nexor - Cyber-Physical Systems for the Industry 4.0 era 01/01/2021 - 31/12/2026

Abstract

The fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0 as it is commonly referred to) is driven by extreme digitalization, enabled by tremendous computing capacity, smart collaborating machines and wireless computer networks. In the last six years, Nexor — a multi-disciplinary research consortium blending expertise from four Antwerp research labs — has built up a solid track record therein. We are currently strengthening the consortium in order to establish our position in the European eco-system. This project proposal specifies our 2021 - 2026 roadmap, with the explicit aim to empower industrial partners to tackle their industry 4.0 challenges. We follow a demand driven approach, convincing industrial partners to pick up our innovative research ideas, either by means of joint research projects (TRL 5—7) or via technology licenses.

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  • Research Project

Dotation for the structural collaboration with Flanders Make. 01/01/2021 - 31/12/2024

Abstract

Flanders Make's mission is to strengthen the international competitiveness of the Flemish manufacturing industry on the long term through industry-driven, precompetitive, excellent research in the field of mechatronics, product development methods and advanced production technologies and by maximizing valorisation in these areas.

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Meaningful and scaleable reuse and composition of models, with frames. 01/01/2019 - 31/12/2024

Abstract

The engineered systems , such as autonomous self-driving vehicles, that we (want to) design and build, are characterized by an ever increasing complexity , offering ever more advanced functionality and comfort. At the same time, the demands on energy efficiency and cost, but also on safety and reliability of those systems, become more stringent, in a quest for some form of optimal, fit-for-purpose designs. Furthermore, in a circular economy, we wish to take into account not only the product, but an ecosystem, spanning entire families of related products, over their entire life-cycle, including production, maintenance, and recycling. The fact that such advanced systems can be built today is largely thanks to the ubiquitous use of models . Models, encoding (for reuse) our knowledge about various aspects of a system or system component, can namely be used for "virtual experimentation" : to perform computer simulations to answer "what if" questions. Such questions allow us to explore different design alternatives. It is this capability that is fueling the 4 th industrial revolution. Models in complex engineered systems vary widely in nature and purpose. They may describe structure and behaviour of systems in different domains such as mechanical, electrical, software, and networks, or different views on the systems such as the stability/control view, the safety view, and the cost/efficiency view, at different levels of abstraction/detail/fidelity. The may also be used to describe and even prescribe (for automation purposes) the complex, concurrent development processes. Process models can be used for "what if" analysis of the engineering processes themselves, leading not only to optimal products, but also to optimal time-to-market. When "what if" analysis is automated , exploring billions of alternatives efficiently in a computer, reaching optimal products/production designs can be accelerated , taking a matter of days or weeks on a cloud computing infrastructure as opposed to the decades required for organic convergence over generations of human engineering improvements. Engineering is however hitting a wall, keeping us from a truly exponential leap in complex systems development . Though advanced computer support exists in the form of modelling languages, model management tools, simulators, etc. for "what if" analysis, managing the meaningful and correct (re)use of models is still a mostly human enterprise, for which no rigorous foundations nor advanced tooling exist. Being constrained by human capabilities, it is costly, slow, and error prone. In some important, yet restricted, areas such as Electronic Design Automation, such foundations and tooling do exist (and fuel a thriving billion $ market). For truly complex, multi-domain systems, knowledge is scattered, often either in experts' minds, or in the best case in text documents and spreadsheets. In this project, we propose to develop a foundational framework as well as prototype tooling for the computer-assisted/automated meaningful (re)use of models . The key to our approach is that we will "eat our own dog food" : we will now apply advanced modelling language engineering, model transformation, property specification, modelling and simulation techniques we have helped develop over the last decades, to explicitly model and reason about the context in which models can be meaningfully (re)used. We call such models "frames" after the original, but incomplete "experimental frames" idea proposed by Bernard Zeigler in the 1980s. Concretely, we will start by using our experience with the modelling language Modelica (for physical systems) and DEVS (for discrete-event modelling of software and networks) to develop the theoretical foundations and application of frames, initially on a representative autonomous vehicle case .

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Smart Port 2025: improving and accelerating the operational efficiency of a harbour eco-system through the application of intelligent technologies. 01/03/2021 - 29/02/2024

Abstract

The Smart Port COOCK-project aims to improve operational efficiency in a harbour context, through the application of intelligent techniques. The project is mainly aimed at SMEs, but also at large corportations. Together, they form the value-chain of the harbour. The digital maturity of these actors will be increased by model (and "digital twins") and data-driven digitization. The project brings together both technology users and providers/integrators

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Collaborative Design Facility (CDF-Infra). 01/06/2020 - 30/09/2023

Abstract

With the evolution towards smart, interconnected products and production systems, the design of physical systems becomes more complex. Traditionally, the design process is rather sequential: engineers from different domains work on their own specific challenges and results are passed to the next group in the development process. This often leads to lengthy iterations. To solve this, companies are shifting to concurrent and multidisciplinary collaboration where engineers from different disciplines work in parallel on the same design. The organization and management of this concurrent process, without suitable HW and SW infrastructure support, requires time and resources which are drawn away from the core engineering tasks. The complexity increases further when the engineers are distributed across multiple locations and/or when different companies (OEMs, Tier1, …) are involved in the collaboration. The facility developed in this project will support collaborative model-based design.

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Framework for systematic design of digital twins (DTDesign). 01/04/2020 - 30/09/2023

Abstract

This project aims at developing a framework, comprising a methodology and supporting tools, for the systematic and efficient design of Digital Twins providing answers to two question types: (i) production parameters - product performance correlation and (ii) faults detection and diagnosis. The purpose of the framework is to support the user in choosing which data sets and models to combine and how to deploy them (Digital Twin implementation) to get an answer to the posed questions based on application specific requirements and criteria. The final goal is to use the developed framework to efficiently design Digital Twins and implement them for seven industrial use cases.

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Product-Assemby Co-Design (PACo). 01/09/2018 - 31/08/2023

Abstract

The Product-Assembly Co-Design (PACo) project is a project within the scope of the cluster Design & Optimisation of Flanders Make. The project aims at bridging the gap between product design and assembly system design by incorporating assembly knowledge into the early stages of the product development. Today, most companies consider assembly aspects later in the design process, often in a manual way, solely relying on the experience of assembly engineers. This leads to numerous design changes later on, causing significant extra costs. The current industrial context requires companies to aim at a first-time-right, down to lot size 1 at the cost of volume production strategy. Hence, considering assembly aspects too late or in a trial-and-error way is no longer an option. All companies involved in the user group of this project indicate a clear need to support their engineers with methods and software tools enabling assessment of assembly complexity in an early design stage, allowing co-optimization of product performance with ease-of-assembly in a quantitative way, and allowing trade-off analysis of various solutions. As these software tools are beyond the state-of-the-art, the research partners (FM-CodesignS, FM-ProductionS, AnSyMo/CoSys-lab, DMMS, and EEDT) will join forces to shift the state-of-the-art in product-assembly co-design, aiming at the following innovation goals: (1) a software environment for the formalization of assembly knowledge (e.g. Design-for-Assembly rules, assembly complexity metrics), (2) tools and algorithms for automated multi-objective optimization of the early-stage design of a product, taking into account the product performance and its assembly complexity, (3) tools and algorithms to automatically find the optimal assembly process (order of steps) and assembly system (resources allocation), for a given product design and a framework for the co-design of both product and its assembly system by combining both 1) and 2) in a semi-automated workflow.

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Automated and simulation based functional safety engineering methodology (aSET_ICON). 01/03/2018 - 31/08/2020

Abstract

Due to the trend towards more complex safety-related products combining mechanics, electric components, electronics and software, their design and development become more complex, leading to longer development times and higher costs as well as higher risks on errors with highly manual safety engineering processes. The goal of the aSET-project to develop methodologies to automate the functional safety engineering process to make the process less error prone and to reduce the required design time and cost compared to the current manual state-of-the-practice. More specifically, the objectives of the project are: (i) the development of a Functional Safety Formal model implemented in a persistent way enabling the intrinsic coupling between all Functional Safety artefacts requested by ISO26262; (ii) the development of a method and demonstrator tooling for the translation of textual requirements into mathematical equations (that can serve as a design contract for the actual hardware design) that describe functionality of E/E/PE enabling the automation of HARA with the help of a functional E/E/PE model and plant model; (iii) the validation of these methods in a generic use case as well as in different industrial use cases demonstrating their functionality and the targeted design time and cost gains.

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A Multi-Paradigm Modeling Foundation for Collaborative Multi-view Model/System Development. 15/07/2017 - 14/07/2018

Abstract

The complexity of current engineered systems has increased drastically over the last decades. The heterogeneity and the complex interplay between physical, software, and network components requires modeling these systems before they are built. These many models must be kept consistent, especially when multiple modelers collaborate on the development of a single system. Inconsistencies arise due to the semantic overlaps between elements in various models. By investigating inconsistencies at a high level of abstraction, it soon becomes clear that they are due to the complexity of the design processes. Humans can no longer comprehend the many relationships between models and their elements. The aim of this PhD project is to identify the causes of inconsistencies in the design of complex heterogeneous systems; to propose the most appropriate analysis and resolution techniques for detecting and fixing inconsistencies, respectively; and finally, to enable the (quantitative or qualitative) assessment of the consequences of applying one resolution technique or another. The work is validated, in collaboration with Flanders Make researchers, using an industrial case study of an "Automated Guided Vehicle" (AGV).

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Efficient Controller Software Variant Development and Validation (ECoVaDeVa_ICON). 01/01/2017 - 30/06/2019

Abstract

Challenge Companies that design and manufacture products face an increasing market demand for small series of customised products, resulting in a huge variability of the product portfolio and especially of the embedded controller software. Today, the development and validation of these controller software variants require a lot of manual effort. This results in long "time-to-market" cycles whenever a new variant is created and, in turn, to some reluctance to bring new product variants to the market, thereby missing business opportunities. Project goals This project aims at providing software product line methods, techniques and tools for the development of mechatronic software controller variants in view of significantly reducing the required development and validation time of new variants. More specifically, the project goals are as follows: For the development and validation of variants that can be built by selecting, combining and configuring existing software components, this project will deliver: 1.The necessary configuration tools to enable application engineers to build and validate industrial-size mechatronic software variants without requiring detailed knowledge of the software, plant and test architectures and of the modelling tools used by the different disciplines. 2.A methodology and toolbox that mechatronic companies can use to set up their mechatronic variant development and validation process, taking into account the specific requirements of each company. For the development and validation of variants that require modifications or additions to the various models involved in the development and validation of new variants, this project will create a prototype of a configurable inconsistency detection tool than can be customised by the different companies for their particular variant design process and tools. This tool allows to detect inconsistencies early in the development stage.

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A scaleable foundation for multi-paradigm modelling. 01/10/2016 - 31/08/2018

Abstract

This research aims to build a foundation for Multi-Paradigm Modelling in the form of the ModelVerse, a conceptual framework and a repository of multi-paradigm models. This forms the basis for distributed, collaborative modelling of systems as well as of the modelling languages used. To explicitly model modelling languages, their concrete and abstract syntax needs to be modelled (the latter in the form of meta-models), as well as their semantics. For semantics, either an interpreter/simulator needs to be provided or a mapping (transformation) to an already known formalism needs to be specified. The ModelVerse supports model manipulations such as documentation, analysis, simulation, (software) synthesis and evolution. All are based on model transformation. This project is funded by the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek - Vlaanderen (FWO).

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Foundations for Co-Simulation. 01/01/2016 - 31/12/2019

Abstract

The engineered systems of today are characterized by an ever increasing complexity. This complexity is often due, not only to a large number of compontents, but above all to heterogeneity of their components. To deal with this heterogeneity, and with the need to protect Intellectual Property (IP) of the authors of the components, co-simulation proposes to not expose the models inside components, but rather to orchestrate their simulation, using the minimal information necessary from the components to guarantee overall correct simulation. This thesis will work on the following problems: 1. To ensure correctness of the developed co-simulation protocols, automata models (for example, in UPPAAL) will be built of these protocols which are amenable to model checking. 2. The further development of the Functional Mockup Interface (FMI) co-simulation standard by investigating exactly what information needs to be exposed to allow for correct and efficient co-simulation. Both the mapping onto know formalisms (such as DEVS) and semantic adaptation will be investigated. The relationship with the High-Level Architecture (HLA) for distributed discrete-event simulation will be investigated. This, and the link with DEVS may lead to new features such as hierarchical co-simulation. 3. The briding of the continuous-discrete gap. This is an issue in so-called hybrid models, where continuous-time models such as differential equations are combined with discrete-time or discrete-event models. These typically result from the modelling of a physical system in its interaction with a software controller and possibly a network. In hybrid models, numerical approximations are made when discretizing continuous models to make them computable on digital devices. Furthermore, modelling constructs and techniques allowing state-event location are necessary. In this research, the primitives for modelling and co-simulation of hybrid models will be investitgated.

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Next generation of heterogeneous sensor networks (NEXOR). 01/01/2015 - 31/12/2020

Abstract

This project represents a research contract awarded by the University of Antwerp. The supervisor provides the Antwerp University research mentioned in the title of the project under the conditions stipulated by the university.

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Multi-Paradigm Modelling for Cyber-Physical Systems (MPM4CPS). 01/01/2015 - 30/04/2018

Abstract

The main objective of the action is to enhance the quality, visibility and impact of Europeanresearch and industrial adoption in the transdisciplinary area of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) by unification through Multi-Paradigm Modelling.

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A scaleable foundation for multi-paradigm modelling. 01/10/2014 - 30/09/2016

Abstract

This research aims to build a foundation for Multi-Paradigm Modelling in the form of the ModelVerse, a conceptual framework and a repository of multi-paradigm models. This forms the basis for distributed, collaborative modelling of systems as well as of the modelling languages used. To explicitly model modelling languages, their concrete and abstract syntax needs to be modelled (the latter in the form of meta-models), as well as their semantics. For semantics, either an interpreter/simulator needs to be provided or a mapping (transformation) to an already known formalism needs to be specified. The ModelVerse supports model manipulations such as documentation, analysis, simulation, (software) synthesis and evolution. All are based on model transformation. This project is funded by the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek - Vlaanderen (FWO).

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  • Research Project

Dotation for the structural collaboration with Flanders Make. 01/06/2014 - 31/12/2020

Abstract

Flanders Make's mission is to strengthen the international competitiveness of the Flemish manufacturing industry on the long term through industry-driven, precompetitive, excellent research in the field of mechatronics, product development methods and advanced production technologies and by maximizing valorisation in these areas.

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  • Research Project

MBSE4 Mechatronics. 01/01/2014 - 31/12/2017

Abstract

This project represents a research agreement between the UA and on the onther hand IWT. UA provides IWT research results mentioned in the title of the project under the conditions as stipulated in this contract.

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Explicit modelling of model debugging and experimentation 01/01/2014 - 31/12/2017

Abstract

The Modelling and Simulation (M&S) approach to systems design can only be successful if the modeller (often a domain expert, such as an automotive engineer) has access to advanced tools which enable the creation of models and provide the necessary framework for performing simulation and deployment of models onto hardware. The environment should allow the modeller to have sufficient control over the simulation execution. During this project, I will transpose current best-practices in code debugging to the M&S world and explicitly model simulation environments for a number of distinct modelling formalisms, as well as for their combinations. This will result in a number of prototype implementations, which I will validate using industrial case studies.

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Testing of rule-based model transformations. 01/10/2013 - 31/12/2013

Abstract

The research objectives of this project are threefold: (1) to formalize model transformation requirements, (2) to automatically generate a set of input test models for a rule-based transformation, capable of revealing errors in a transformation and (3) to develop a novel oracle function, to test the implementation of a model transformation specification.

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Study of the interaction between automotive software and its environment by means of modeling and co-simulation. 01/01/2012 - 31/12/2015

Abstract

During the development of software-intensive systems, such as automative applications, simulation is required to test models and assumptions during each phase of the development process. This project investigates techniques to support efficient and correct co-simulation of model components. This focus is on the co-simulation of the software and its environment.

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Evolution of Modelling Languages. 01/01/2010 - 31/12/2010

Abstract

In model-driven engineering, evolution is inevitable over the course of the complete life cycle of complex software-intensive systems and more importantly of entire product families. Not only instance models, but also entire modelling languages are subject to change. This is in particular true for domain-specific languages. Up to this day, modelling languages are evolved manually, with tedious and error-prone migration of artifacts such as instance models as a result. In this project, the different evolution scenarios for various kinds of modelling artifacts, such as instance models, meta-models and transformation models are researched. Subsequently, evolution is de-composed into four primitive scenarios such that all possible evolutions can be covered. This structured approach enables the design of solution for (semi-)automatic modelling language evolution.

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