“The beauty and power of formal software analysis never cease to surprise.”

Tim Willemse is a Full Professor of Algorithms and Logics for Verification, and he is the chair of the Formal System Analysis group of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). Tim’s research focusses on applying, developing and scaling formal methods for designing correct and reliable systems. His research receives financial support from organisations such as NWO and the European Commission, and commercial parties, including ASML, Canon Production Printing and Verum. 

His group works on algorithms and theory for parity games and fixpoint logics, such as parameterised Boolean equation systems, and their application. Their theories and algorithms drive the model checking technology offered by mCRL2, a toolset for specifying and analysing (software controlled) systems.

Tim led the development of dedicated verification tooling for the software controlling the physics experiments at CERN. He co-developed the verification technology underlying the Model-Driven Engineering toolset Dezyne, a product of Verum B.V., which is used on a day-to-day basis by the high-tech industry. Together with Bas Luttik and in collaboration with ProRail, he analysed and helped improve the proposed ERTMS Hybrid Train Detection concept (previously known as ERTMS Hybrid Level 3).

Tim Willemse received his PhD and MSc in Computer Science from TU/e. He held a part-time affiliation with TNO-ESI (until 2024) as a senior research fellow, and CERN (until 2018), as a software engineer and researcher. Before joining Eindhoven again in 2006, he worked as a researcher at ASML and Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. In both positions, he worked on Model-Based Testing techniques. Until December 2017, Tim was managing director of the national research school IPA. He is the chair of the Industry Committee of Formal Methods Europe, and a member of the societies ACM SIGACT, ACM SIGLOG, EATCS, VERSEN, IPA.

Tim has been involved in a wide range of research projects, including NWO-TOP project AVVA, a project on exploring the use of massive parallelism to speed up verification and the use of verification to assess the correctness of parallel programs. He was project leader on FP7 TTP VICTORIA, a project exploring the connection between the industrial language Dezyne and mCRL2, on the NWO project VOCHS, (verification of control software of the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider) and on the NWO-project COMFORTS (verification of data-dependent and real-time systems).