"Software is an intrinsic and often underestimated part of mechanical engineering. My mission is the development of software for civil engineering and logistic systems that is guaranteed to be correct, efficient, and maintainable."

Wan Fokkink is a Full Professor of Model Based System Engineering in the Control Systems Technology Group in the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e).  His specialties include supervisory control synthesis, distributed algorithms, safety-critical software, protocol verification, and process algebra.

Wan’s research targets analysis and design of distributed systems, broadly construed, ranging from automatically synthesizing control software to formal verification of communication protocols and executable models of biological systems. Recent research has focused on applying formal modeling and analysis techniques to automatically generate software for civil engineering structures like bridges, dams and tunnels. This development process uses the requirements of the object to constrain its possible behavior. The aim is to automatically transform the requirements into PLC code that governs movements within, for example, a bridge.

Wan Fokkink obtained his MSc in Mathematics (with honors) from the University of Amsterdam (1990) where he also received his PhD in Computer Science (1994). Following this, he undertook a post-graduate position at Utrecht University and became a lecturer at the University of Wales, Swansea. He subsequently headed the Embedded Systems Group at CWI, the Dutch national research institute for mathematics and computer science (2000-2004). He was part-time full professor on Stochastic Design at TU/e (2012-2016). In addition to his work at TU/e, Wan has been a full professor of Theoretical Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam since 2004. He is co-founder and was the vice-chair of IFIP Working Group 1.8 on Concurrency Theory and the chair of the board of the national research school IPA.

• Department of Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Partners in (semi-)industry

• Rijkswaterstaat
• Vanderlande Industries