Introduction / mission

In our lab, we develop theory and engineering methods for the design and formal verification of control in cyber-physical systems (CPS).

Organisational profile

For these systems a tight coupling between the physical and the digital domain via computation, control and communication poses new engineering challenges that have direct impact on future technology innovation. In the Netherlands, the automotive, high-tech, and medical industries face the challenge of maintaining provable reliability in the face of an inevitable growth in scale, functionality, and autonomy. As a part of the Control systems section, we develop formal methods for the design and verification of control implementations for cyber-physical systems.

In this lab, we are especially interested in developing formal methods to handle the uncertainty in cyber-physical systems caused by (1) the inherent stochasticity in physical systems, (2) the use of noisy sensor measurements, and (3) the lack of exact model knowledge. The use of data for feedback, estimation, and Bayesian inference to tackle uncertainty and attain formal guarantees is a common theme in the lab.

Applications of formal methods include inter alia formally-specified motion planning for robots in uncertain environments, cruise control synthesis for platooning of cars, and temperature control in buildings.