Are you fascinated by the large role software plays in the control of high-tech systems? Are you eager to contribute to improving supervisory controller development, and making it more structured, resulting in high-quality, functionally correct software? Are you eager to apply and valorize scientific results in this field in high-tech domains such as semiconductor machines, together with a highly innovative industrial partner in the Brainport region? Then, this PhD position is made for you!
InformationComplex dynamical systems, such as semiconductor equipment, consists of many interconnected modules, which are functionally, digitally and physically connected. Supervisory controllers that integrate the behavior of modules into meaningful and expected behavior are becoming increasingly important. Supervisory Controller Synthesis is an engineering approach to automatically derive a supervisory controller for a given discrete-event model that is safe with respect to certain requirements. Yet, the application of the approach is limited by the fact that tools for synthesis cannot always deal with the state space explosion involved in complex systems. The aim of this PhD project is to develop distributed supervisory controller synthesis techniques that are scalable to practical systems.
Current decomposition approaches for supervisory control synthesis, like the multilevel discrete-event systems approach, are not well applicable to manufacturing systems where control involves properties of the manufactured goods, such as the wafers in lithography machines. Furthermore, to make supervisors performance aware and thus go beyond relatively straightforward safety and progress properties, system requirements related to the timing of events and the results from performance optimization need to be included in the models. This PhD position will address these challenges by developing new timing-aware distributed supervisory control synthesis methods.
We invite highly motivated students with a strong background in discrete-event systems, supervisory control theory, and formal methods to apply for the PhD position within the Supervisory Control group (see
Group Supervisory Control), which is part of the Control Systems Technology (CST) section of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. The members of this group conduct research on model- and synthesis-based engineering of supervisory controllers, mostly using discrete-event systems. As such, you will be able to discuss your research and brainstorm with your fellow group members.
This PhD position is part of the project on ‘Holistic Design Automation for Semiconductor Manufacturing Equipment’, in which 6 PhD students will be employed at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the department of Mechanical Engineering, as well as the departments of Electrical Engineering and Mathematics and Computer Science. You will have the chance to collaborate with ASML to apply the developed results in an industrial context, thereby building both a strong academic and industrial profile.
You will have access to the graduate courses at the Dutch Institute of Systems and Control (DISC) and will have the opportunity to collaborate with industry in the Brainport region and academic researchers worldwide. By joining us, you will be part of a vibrant community of more than 60 researchers including faculty members, postdocs and PhDs working on diverse topics in the field of control systems and its applications.
This PhD position is jointly supervised by Michel Reniers and Martijn Goorden.