Master thesis assignments

Below you find a number of examples of potential assignments for a master thesis. In general there are far more assignments than can be listed here. It is always more fruitful to do a master thesis assignment that matches your interests. Therefore, I invite you to discuss your particular desires with me. Please note that it is wise to at least start with organizing your master thesis two months in advance. Students in Embedded Systems that first have to do a premaster assignment should contact me well before. Doing the premaster assignment beside other courses in part time is very well possible.

• The Maeslantkering is the biggest water defense work in the Netherlands. It is larger than the Eifeltower. It protects the industrial and harbour area of Rotterdam. There are two locomotives that close the two doors that protect influx of water into the river Rhine at high tide. The software in these locomotives needs to be replaced as the PLC's inside them are end of life. Rijkswaterstaat requested whether it is possible to formally model the new software for the locomotive, and prove it correct to guarantee that the new locomotive works flawlessly, at any time, especially in those times of need. They are looking for a master student that is willing to do the modelling and verification.
• Control of wafersteppers at ASML is largely programmed using formal models written in the specification language ASD. One of the components takes care of scheduling the wafers such that they are properly and timely measured and projected upon. Sometimes the scheduling is disturbed because of an unexpected event, for instance because some component emits an unexpected error message. In such a case a rescheduling is necessary. The question is how to implement such a rescheduling such that rescheduling does satisfy a number of correctness properties. These properties have been proven for static scheduling, but it is not so clear how to do it for dynamic rescheduling. Persons involved at the side of ASML are Erik Kouters, Sander de Putter and Arthur Swaving. At the side of the TU/e are Thomas Neele and Jan Friso Groote.
• At Philips in Best software is being redesigned continuously. Currently, this is done using model based design using the languages ASD and Dezyne developed at Verum. An interesting question is whether the newly designed software behaves exactly as the original software. It appears that model based testing is the excellent way to go ahead, where the old software is tested for compliance with the new models. The research question is to see whether this is viable by applying model based testing on a recently renewed piece of software.
• Modelling and analysing systems with hard real time constraints is hard. At ASML, where large parts of the software is currently designed using model driven design, there is a desire to be able to model and analyse systems where hard real time constraints play a role. Such requirements vary from input signals that must be processed within a particular time interval, robot arms that must have moved out of a critical region within a certain time, to wafers that must have been processed in time. There are various methods and tools available to do such analyses, but the question is whether such methods will be able to provide concrete insights in concrete real time systems. Your assignment will be to model concrete real time behaviour of concrete systems at ASML and see which methods are most effective in proving that those systems satisfy the required real time properties.
• Probabilistic behaviour is very interesting. This is the reason that the mCRL2 toolset supports probabilities. Checking probabilistic modal formulas is a challenging endeavour of which the basic techniques to do so are known. This master assignment is about making the available theory concrete in a tool. The basic steps are to define the basic modal property language and to define the translation towards PRESs, the probabilistic counterpart of PBESs. If there is sufficient time available, an algorithm to solve the PRESs is also very desirable.
• Plain probabilistic bisimulation is provided with a very efficient algorithms to calculate whether two states are equal. The situation is different when combined transitions are also allowed. If there are two nondeterministic transitions a.s and a.t, then a combined transition is a.(p s+(1-p) t), or in words, after the action a, state s can be reached with probablity p and state t can be reached with probability (1-p). Combined probabilistic bisimulation takes such combined transitions into account. The question is whether an efficient algorithm can be found and implemented that determines whether two states are combined probabilistically bisimilar.