Vision on System Qualities Reasoning in the High-Tech Equipment Industry TNO

This document presents TNO-ESI’s Vision on System Qualities Reasoning for the Dutch high tech equipment industry. It is written for industry leaders, system architects, R&D strategists, and researchers who need to understand how system qualities such as productivity, energy efficiency, resource usage, and cost can be systematically engineered across increasingly complex, interconnected, and software-defined systems.
The document explains why system qualities must become a first-class engineering concern and outlines a long-term roadmap for research and innovation. It introduces key industry challenges in context of emerging technological and societal trends and defines strategic directions to realize the vision by developing methodologies that allow engineers to stay in control of system qualities through the entire lifecycle.
The research roadmap is structured around the three major industry needs, each with several strategic research directions:
1. Analysis, prediction, and optimization of system qualities over the full lifecycle
• Reasoning with uncertainty
• Quantitative modeling
• Model extraction and calibration
• Performance verification
• Runtime monitoring and optimization
2. Systematic reasoning on multiple system qualities
• Trade‑off analysis using quantitative models
• Multi‑objective optimization
3. System-dependent analysis, prediction, and optimization of system qualities
• Performance engineering for systems of systems
• Performance engineering for product families
• Performance engineering for software‑defined systems
• Performance engineering for AI‑enabled systems
Addressing the needs together forms a connected strategy: from early design to runtime adaptation, from expert-driven to democratized engineering with quantitative reasoning, and from individual components and individual systems to ecosystems.