The future of supervisory control is automated
Thursday, 26 November 2026 · Software tracks – time and room to be announced
Speakers
About this session
Supervisory control is a key part of cyber-physical systems, enabling system resources to work together in a safe, correct and optimal way. Developing supervisory controllers by hand becomes increasingly challenging, for instance due to growing performance demands, growing system complexity, the need to support more and more variants and a shortage of skilled engineers. In contrast, with synthesis-based engineering (SBE), correct-by-construction supervisory controllers can automatically be computed from system models and requirement specifications that describe what the system should do. An automatically synthesized supervisory controller is easy to update, allows for advanced domain controllers and guarantees maximal permissiveness.
SBE has successfully been applied in industry, for example in the semiconductor domain, industrial printing and healthcare. TNO-ESI is currently also investigating the application in the fusion energy domain together with Differ, addressing challenges in supervisory-control design and exploring model-based approaches to support the development of next-generation control systems.
About the speakers
Matthijs van Berkel
Matthijs van Berkel is the fusion energy department head at Differ and a part-time associate professor in control systems at Eindhoven University of Technology. He holds an MSc in mechanical engineering and a PhD from TUE.
Andrea Peruffo
Andrea Peruffo is a research fellow at TNO-ESI. He received his BSc and MSc (cum laude) in automation engineering from the University of Padova, Italy, and the D.Phil. degree in computer science from the University of Oxford, UK. In 2016, he was a research engineer with Inria Rennes, France. In 2020, he was a visiting researcher at NII Tokyo, Japan. Moreover, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher with the Delft Center for Systems and Control. His research interests include hybrid systems, formal verification and control theory.
