Theme: Change Impact Analysis
Software-intensive systems constantly evolve. To prevent software changes from unintentionally introducing costly system defects, it is important to both understand how the current software behaves, and what impact changes have on that behavior. This helps to reduce risks.
For more information, you can:
The following MSc graduation projects currently have an open vacancy:
- Intuitive Insights into the Impact of Software Changes on System Behavior at TNO-ESI
- Introduction and context: Managing the complexity of changing software in cyber-physical systems is notoriously challenging. It is difficult to understand the impact of software changes on system behavior, which may result in hesitance to change software due to the risk of introducing regressions. To alleviate this challenge TNO-ESI together with ASML have developed an automated Change Impact Analysis approach, that provides insight into unexpected differences in system behavior caused by software changes. Any such differences are highlighted and visualized as state machines, to make them intuitive to read and understand by engineers. Nevertheless, the intuitiveness of representing behavioral differences can be improved.
- The assignment: In this research project you will investigate algorithms for computing structural differences between two (or more) state machines (labeled transition systems), and visualizing them in a way to make them intuitive to understand by engineers and architects. You will work on characterizing unintuitive structural differences, and proposing (adjusted) state machine comparison algorithms that only provide intuitive results. Ideally you would formulate an unambiguous definition of intuitive structural differences (from a user perspective), and develop efficient algorithms that compute them.
- Part of the team: You will join forces with a larger team of researchers at TNO-ESI.
- Requirements: You are an MSc student in Mathematics or Computer Science looking for a graduation project of 6-9 months. You have experience working with algorithms and data structures, such as graphs and labeled transition systems. You like working on theoretical challenges as well as implementing your ideas in code, to validate them. You are motivated to make industrial impact.
If you're interested, contact Dennis Hendriks.
Projects that have their vacancy filled or have already completed:
