Category: Interviews

When designing a mechatronic system, the actuation often receives the most attention. But the bearing is just as decisive for the accuracy and the system behavior. Hans van de Rijdt and Marc Vermeulen are therefore developing a new training for Mechatronics Academy that is scheduled at High Tech Institute in March 2024: ‘Bearing principles for precision motion’.

There is a wide choice in machine building when it comes to bearings, from sliding, roller and air bearings to hydraulic, elastic and magnetic bearings. Choice stress is therefore lurking. However, that has not prevented bearing technology from becoming somewhat neglected in the high-tech world in recent decades.

Marc Vermeulen, working as a principal mechanical system architect at ASML, does have an explanation for this. “In mechatronics we often talk about the actuated direction, in which you have to achieve a certain accuracy with a drive and a measuring system.”

However, the direction perpendicular to the driven direction is equally important. “Then you’re talking about the degrees of freedom that you don’t actuate. So, you have to constrain these and how do you do that? Because that ultimately determines the accuracy and the entire system behavior to a large extent. The bearings are indeed important for that.”

At least three errors

In his work as an independent consultant in the high-tech industry Hans van de Rijdt regularly encounters that certain bearing principles are overlooked or that pitfalls are not avoided. Together with Vermeulen, he developed the Bearing Solutions training course that will soon start at High Tech Institute. Van de Rijdt: “It happened recently during a review of a large project, on which 140 people worked. Then you would expect that there are enough of them who know something about bearings. Still, I saw at least three errors in the application of bearings.”

It was a design in which the bearing makes a very small angular movement. “That bearing can jam because the lubricant is not distributed properly. That had not been taken into account. Also, an incorrect ball cage had been used, so that the required number of strokes would not be achieved. Bearing suppliers often don’t tell you that sort of thing. If you call, you will get the salesperson who does not know either and it is very difficult to get in touch with the engineer.”

Hans van de Rijdt (left) and Marc Vermeulen (right).

From performance and service life to noise pollution and delivery time

Many factors play a role in the choice of a certain bearing type. In the first place the performance – think of accuracy, speed and acceleration – and the service life, which can be negatively affected by friction and wear. An air bearing scores high on both, but less on costs. For example, an air supply must be integrated into the system design.

Depending on the application, other factors may come into play. A good example is patient welfare. This is the case with CT scanners, for example, where an X-ray tube provided with bearings rotates in a circular gantry around the patient. At Philips, such a scanner was always equipped with a roller bearing, Van de Rijdt recalls, but at a certain point they switched to a large air bearing. “That was for the sake of performance, but above all to reduce noise pollution from the bearing.”

In coarse applications, the choice of bearing can also be crucial. Van de Rijdt talks about a large offshore crane with a ring bearing of 8 meters in diameter. “The lead time for making that large ring bearing was one and a half years, because it was of course not in stock at the factory. That’s why they looked at a sliding bearing as an alternative, which would be much more favorable in terms of lead time. I then made a complete study of it. In the end, that alternative was dropped because the stick-slip behavior of the sliding bearing with such a large diameter had too much of an impact on the operation by the crane driver.”

Ingrained patterns and new competences

In addition to rational substantiation, the choice of bearings often also involves ingrained patterns, says Vermeulen. Placement machines, for example, use roller bearings and not air bearings for cost reasons. Roller bearings, on the other hand, are not used in lithography machines, because lubrication and wear could cause contamination. “Not appropriate in a semicon factory; that’s is a kind of dogma for many manufacturers.” However, the question of whether air bearings can still be replaced with roller bearings for cost reasons comes up regularly.

Van de Rijdt recently was faced with it again. “I could just refer to my report from twelve years ago. For some applications, the performance of ball bearings is sufficient and then their application is more cost-effective. I just tested what people were afraid of. You can neatly control the contamination by ensuring that the bearings are in a downflow under the wafer.”

Things are moving in the meantime, Vermeulen sees at ASML. “All kinds of tests with lubricants and measurements of stiffness and friction are now underway for roller bearings, for example. Of course, we already had the competences for air bearings, magnetic bearings and also elastic bearings (leafspring guides are a popular bearing solution for stages with short strokes, because they are accurate, backlash-free and frictionless, ed.). So now a certain competence is also being built up for roller bearings.”

Avoid overdimensioning

That broad range of competences is important, says Vermeulen. “Leafspring guides have become somewhat self-evident for us. You can make them in one piece, monolithic, with wire EDM. At a certain point you just cannot stop adding complexity and costs. ‘Better safe than sorry’ then becomes the motto, ‘let’s do it this way, then we’ll know for sure it’s right’. But you also have to consider the cost aspect; this is becoming increasingly important.”

Van de Rijdt agrees: “If something has to be nanometer accurate, then monolithic and wire EDM will do the job. As soon as you get out of that range and just talk about micrometers, it doesn’t have to be monolithic. For example, I have designed focus modules for different applications, with exactly the same specification. There was a factor of ten price difference, purely due to the chosen design for the guide.” Vermeulen: “So it starts with the assumptions on which you design a device. The same applies to the bearings. Overdimensioning and preventing that should be a common thread here.” In this way, more attention to bearings can lead to less complexity and costs.

Solutions and applications

The new training will be called Bearing principles for precision motion. That’s a conscious choice, says Hans van de Rijdt. “It’s about solutions for concrete bearing problems, about applications of different types of bearings. We do not dive very deeply into, for example, the tribological aspects, but it’s much more about when you can use which type and what you have to take into account. The best thing is to tell about it from your own experience.”

Insight into how a bearing works will be presented, says Marc Vermeulen. “Many people don’t know, for example, that you can pull an air bearing if you pretension it. So, for example, the fundameltal question of what gives a bearing stiffness will be addressed. But we are indeed not going to discuss the differential equations that describe the motions in a bearing.”

Because that’s usually not where the problem lies in practice, adds Van de Rijdt. “Many people are analytically very strong, but they must have a design to make calculations about. I often notice, not only for bearings but across the entire system scope, that designers and architects have difficulty putting the first lines of a design on paper. If you want to make an initial estimate for a bearing to determine whether it can achieve the required performance and service life, you must first set up a design for it. Going through those iterations is something I want to help people with.”

The training is aimed at designers and architects who regularly have to select a bearing type in their designs. They then have to make a trade-off and optimize the application of the chosen bearing. This is also where control engineering comes into play, for example with magnetic bearings. Think of the ‘flying carpets’ in the ASML machines that have to continuously position a wafer at lightning speed. Vermeulen “They do indeed need to be carefully controlled, but that is not the scope of our training; it is not intended for control engineers.” However, some “basic calculations” will be made to determine the bandwidth and stiffness of the control, adds Van de Rijdt. “We want to provide the designer and the system architect with insight into this.”

Architects Vermeulen and Van de Rijdt form teaching duo

Hans van de Rijdt and Marc Vermeulen both studied Mechanical Engineering in Eindhoven, at the university of applied sciences and university of technology (TUE), respectively. They both did an assignment that suited the Dutch school of design principles for precise movement and positioning. They were colleagues at the illustrious Philips CFT and worked together at ASML on wafer stages, Van de Rijdt on a temporary basis and Vermeulen as an employee. This year, at the request of Mechatronics Academy, they started developing a training on bearing technology together. From next year, they will provide that course, together with ASML employee and TUE part-time professor Hans Vermeulen (indeed, the brother of).

Van de Rijdt worked for Philips CFT for a long time and has now been active for fifteen years as a self-employed professional serving the well-known players in Dutch high-tech, from Philips and ASML to Nexperia. He fulfilled roles as a design engineer, lead design engineer, group leader and department leader. “In the end, I decided that engineering is the most rewarding to do and that the role of system architect suits me.” In 2019, he received the Rien Koster award from DSPE (Dutch Society for Precision Engineering) for his achievements as a developer of multidisciplinary, simple concepts for complex high-tech systems that score well on manufacturability and cost.

Vermeulen obtained his Ph.D. at TUE for the design of a 3D coordinate measuring machine, which was later commercialized by Zeiss. Then he went to Philips CFT. He first wanted to work for different customers and applications before focusing on ASML because of his fascination for the operation of lithography machines. In 2007, he joined the Veldhoven company as an architect for modules of DUV systems. He recently became the mechanical architect for the system that delivers high-pressure tin droplets for the generation of EUV light.

Van de Rijdt gained his first teaching experience 25 years ago, when the prominent companies in the field started with a Mechatronics master class. “I then wrote a booklet for this, Constructeursweetjes (Things a designer needs to know). Things I had experienced in my first ten years of work that you typically didn’t learn in school but were very useful for a designer to know. For example, what you have to take into account concerning with respect to tolerances when milling? Or what you can expect when you start welding a material. So not the design principles, but mainly practical aspects concerning manufacturability. I taught that in the master class and bearings was one of the modules that featured in it.”

Vermeulen also has a long history, at TUE and Philips, of teaching, particularly design principles. “And I have been contributing to the architect training within ASML for a number of years now. As a system architect you have to be a kind of teacher anyway. Involve your people in the making of choices and explain these in such a way that they understand.” As of recently, he also contributes to the trainings Mechatronics System Design and Design Principles for Precision Engineering of Mechatronics Academy. Bearing principles for precision motion is the first one he is developing himself, together with Van de Rijdt. “Our previous collaborations have always been fun; we complement each other well.”

This article is written by Hans van Eerden, freelancer for High-Tech Systems.

With new developments, engineers often apply proven designs, with or without minor modifications. So why do they still fail to deliver solutions that customers demand? Usually, communication is the major stumbling block. High Tech Institute trainer Eric Burgers explains how SysML helps to successfully communicate design ideas for complex systems. Eric Burgers teaches the course Introduction to SysML and System modelling with SysML.

In an ideal situation, a project starts with perfect requirements: unambiguous, specific and precise, and just enough to describe the problem to be solved, with sufficient room for creativity and innovation. The designs meeting these requirements are complete, specify decomposition, behavior and collaboration completely and are 100 percent consistent and testable in all respects. Ultimately, a system is delivered according to the requirements and fulfilling its intended use.

In a nightmare version, a project departs from inconsistent or contradictory requirements, containing phrases like “the system will facilitate …” or “contribute to …”. The system boundary is difficult to define. The whole is decomposed into vague components, such as (categories of) devices or even arbitrary groups of “things.” Desired behavior, if specified, appears to be separate from the design or is factually incomplete, leaving much room for interpretation. In the ultimate nightmare version of a project, a system is built that’s not based on the actual design. Defects are repaired by piling note upon note, making the design file an absolute mess. Only when everything is read in the correct order can the actual design be derived.

                   

Boehm’s second law of engineering: during a software project, costs to find and fix bugs get higher as time goes by.

Most projects aren’t complete nightmares but neither are they ideal. Created designs don’t always meet all requirements and may contain inconsistencies, omissions or other defects. These defects are a potential source of failure costs: defects introduced during requirements analysis or design become more expensive to fix the later they’re resolved. All while they could have been prevented.

This raises a point of conflict: designs are meant to mitigate the risk of building wrong or faulty systems, yet projects very often create designs that don’t reflect the customer’s requirements, thus defeating the whole purpose of a design. Why is this and what can be done about it?

Bottom-up approach

Projects come in all shapes and sizes and solve simple to challenging problems. Relatively simple, small projects aren’t too difficult to complete. The risk of failure increases as a project becomes more complex. The complexity of a project is related to the complexity (in terms of size or difficulty) of the product being made and the size of the organization making it.

Large(er) projects are often organized into discipline-specific development groups. These groups do discuss their interfaces with each other, but there’s usually no overarching approach to describing how to integrate all the components into one working whole. Sometimes it even seems that interfaces are created ad hoc.

This has all the traits of a bottom-up approach, where discipline-specific parts are first designed and produced and then assembled in the hopes of getting a working product. Such an approach may work for less complicated projects where engineers can understand the entire product with all its details. When parts can affect each other through their behavior or properties, however, it can be difficult to assess how the whole will behave, especially if the building blocks come from different disciplines.

The risks of increasing complexity

Drawings

One way to deal with large, complex projects is to create extensive documentation to disseminate design ideas to all engineers involved. In technical fields such as mechanical engineering, software engineering, industrial automation and civil engineering, there are often standardized ways to do this. In practice, documentation is supplemented by drawings made in popular tools such as Powerpoint or Visio (Windows) or Omnigraffle (Mac OS). In addition, Excel is used to exchange large amounts of information.

In multidisciplinary projects, the use of supplementary drawings and other project-specific tools increases to bridge the gap between the disciplines. In principle, there’s nothing wrong with this; the transfer of design ideas and information between disciplines is badly needed. Without bridging the interdisciplinary gaps, a project will encounter serious integration problems. However, “project-specific” also means repeatedly inventing the wheel, especially when the work is done by consortia that change from project to project.

Another problem with these drawings is that there’s no general agreement on what they should represent. Moreover, there’s no guarantee that they’re complete and consistent. As a result, there’s a real risk that the drawings, although clear to the author, may be misinterpreted by readers, which in turn leads to defects in the product that aren’t discovered until later stages of the project.

Very often this way of working and the associated integration problems are simply accepted. As the project approaches the completion date, the problems are resolved through rework or patching, or they’re simply left in the project as “future work.” An alternative approach is to standardize the communication of design ideas on a project or even company basis. This has the disadvantage that the conventions are ‘local’ to the project being undertaken – each participant will have to learn them.

It makes more sense to adopt an industry standard, including supporting tools. Then the conventions only need to be learned once to be applied many times, regardless of the project or organization. All the better if the standard allows documents and drawings to be replaced by a single source of truth that’s always up-to-date.

Modeling language

The complexity of projects, or technology in general, is only increasing. Think of the difference between the first phones and today’s smartphones. Or compare the first cars with the vehicles seen on the road today. While the main function has remained the same (communicating, driving), today’s systems are increasingly integrated into a larger whole to provide users with additional services that can’t be provided by the systems themselves. This trend has been identified and described in many sources, including the vision documents of Incose – Vision 2025 and more recently Vision 2035.

To cope with the increasing degree of integration, Incose is promoting the transition to model-based systems engineering (MBSE). This involves using models to design and verify complex systems. One of the first steps toward MBSE is the adoption of a language suitable for building such models. SysML is one such language.

SysML allows the representation of different types of systems and their behavior, as well as their interactions with the environment.

The Systems Modeling Language (SysML) is a general-purpose modeling language designed to help engineers develop and document complex systems with a large number of components. The language is widely used in industries such as aerospace, automotive, infrastructure and defense. The graphical notation provided allows the representation of different types of systems and their behavior, as well as their interactions with the environment. This enables engineers to effectively and efficiently communicate their ideas and ensure that all those involved in the development process have the same understanding of the product to be built. Because the language isn’t discipline specific, systems can be described at an overarching level.

The four pillars of SysML

1. Structure: a system can be decomposed into smaller parts, which have interfaces with each other.
2. Behavior: three types of behavior – flow-based, event-based and message-based – can be specified and related to one another.
3. Requirements: system requirements and their tests can be defined.
4. Parametrics: once described, a system can also be simulated.

                   

Increased precision

When using SysML, the first thing you’ll notice is that the designs are more precise and thus require extra work to complete. However, that precision also ensures that everyone involved can interpret the designs in the same way as the author and that defects and omissions are much easier to identify and prevent. Because it’s almost impossible to create an inconsistent design, failure costs are avoided. If these costs exceed the initial investment, there’s a business case for using SysML.

Implementing SysML can come across as a daunting task. At first glance, it can seem like a considerable challenge to mold an entire complex system into a model suitable for analysis and simulation. In practice, the transition is often incremental and organizations gradually apply SysML more and more to describe designs. Slowly but surely, documents are either being replaced by models or become views on the model, until at the higher levels of maturity, there are no documents at all because all information is encapsulated in models.

As SysML is a comprehensive language, it takes time to master all the details. Proper training will speed up adoption considerably. Engineers will certainly also have to get used to the increased precision with which designs are created from the start. Once successfully adopted, SysML will improve design communication and quality.

For specifications with a lot of geometric information, as often created in civil engineering, SysML is less effective. The language lends itself particularly well to cyber-physical, software-intensive systems. A good example is an infrastructure project in Amsterdam-Zuid, where the designs were created by the supplier and reviewed by the acquiring party. Here, the use of SysML resulted in a significant increase in development speed, with the number of defects found being significantly lower than average. Also elsewhere, SysML is proving that it can prevent nightmares and bring projects closer to the ideal.

This article is written by Nieke Roos, tech editor for Bits&Chips.

Pieter Nuij, technologist and trainer of the ‘Experimental techniques in mechatronics‘ training at High Tech Institute, is a warm advocate of knowledge transfer within and between companies. ‘The Dutch high-tech ecosystem has grown up with it.’

After a career spanning more than forty years, Pieter Nuij is trying to “retire step by step”. He is gradually scaling back his activities as a machine dynamics consultant, under the company name Madycon. But he still cannot stop teaching.

The role of teacher is the common thread in his career, which, after studying mechanical engineering at TU Eindhoven, took him past various organizations.

Keeping open knowledge transfer alive

Two things concern him. “At the Philips CFT (Center for Manufacturing Techniques) we learned: if you have a question, pick up the phone and find a colleague who can answer it. If that doesn’t work, you make something up yourself. The person you call benefits from the same habit. My generation clearly has this mentality of reciprocity. I think that is at the heart of the success of the Eindhoven open development model.”

Nuij wonders whether future generations will also stick to knowledge exchange. He draws hope from organisations such as the MSKE (Mechatronics Systems Knowledge Exchange), where engineers from different companies talk confidentially yet openly with each other about their technical challenges. Another example is the Mechatronics Contact Group, where it is more about long-term policy and vision for the Dutch mechatronics landscape. “When I left MSKE, my story about the importance of knowledge transfer was widely recognized and supported.”

More and more specialties

Ultimately, the Eindhoven region can only stay in the lead of the high-tech world thanks to knowledge, Nuij emphasizes. He points to a trend that many companies do not yet know how to deal with. “The number of technical specialties in industry continues to grow. Think of cleanliness, fatigue, advanced manufacturing such as 3D printing with different materials, and computational fluid dynamics for predicting heat and flow in systems. This also involves acoustics, for example. For example, flows in cooling channels must be ultra-quiet. The slightest disturbance is already too much.”

Trainer Pieter Nuij.

Role for CFT 2.0 or ASML?

How can companies secure all those specialties for themselves, is Nuij’s second head-scratcher. “You can think of a network of independent specialists who can be hired. But I still see too few top specialists available for that. An alternative is companies that offer their specialties in the market.”

This brings Nuij back to the Eindhoven open development model. “One reason not to do it is that you don’t want competitors’ specialists looking into your own kitchen. But we have to realize that the actual competitors are in the Far East. If we want to stay ahead here, we have to cooperate more in development in specialties and create mutual trust for that.”

Nuij can imagine ASML taking the lead in this. “Put flatly, they have the most to lose and are most dependent on suppliers in the area. ASML is the only company that does have all the specialties occupied, but if they continue to grow they will need even more specialists.” Sending those specialists to the companies in ASML’s ecosystem remains difficult, Nuij wants to say.

System architect becomes communicator

If the number of specialties keeps growing, what does that mean for the system architect, who after all has to know (a little) about everything in order to guard the coherence in the system design? “The system architect must indeed keep more and more plates in the air at the same time, be able to think about them with sufficient specificity and at the same time keep his distance; that balance is quite difficult. There will always be people with the necessary breadth, but I doubt if there are enough of them.”

The current perception is still that the system architect can fill in the entire system architecture. Nuij no longer believes in that. “It comes much more down to teamwork and breakdowns in the architect role. Someone with good interpersonal skills must then keep the team together and keep the communication flowing well: make sure people respect each other, accept things from each other and dare to ask questions.”

Philips legacy well placed

In any case, what helps is that – for knowledge transfer and deepening of specialties – the Philips legacy has been preserved. Nuij refers to the Philips Centre for Technical Training (CTT), which ceased to exist in 2011. The CTT courses ended up at training institutes such as High Tech Institute and its content partners. He still teaches the course ‘Experimental techniques in mechatronics‘ (ETM) of Mechatronics Academy there. “I set that up over 25 years ago at CFT and later transferred it to CTT.”

He started as a lecturer even earlier. “When I started working on optical disc mastering at Philips in 1985, I was also responsible for knowledge transfer as a mechanical discipline leader. Then I was at Brüel & Kjaer in Denmark for four years, specifically for knowledge transfer in sales support. Later I worked at CFT in the mechatronics group, under Maarten Steinbuch. When he became a professor at TU, I went with him. Among other things, I gave the signal analysis lecture and enjoyed all the young guys who wanted to go into engineering. Then the focus shifted from teaching to produce good engineers to research to get high citation index scores and I left for NTS.”

Nuij wanted to work in industry again, and at NTS he could also indulge in knowledge development and transfer. “Often in a master-family situation.” When he needed more flexibility and freedom in his work for personal reasons, he started for himself as a machine dynamics specialist. “In that role, too, I started focusing more and more on transferring knowledge.”

Enthusiastic about master-mate

Thus teaching continued to attract Nuij. “Especially because of the increasing number of examples I can give from my own experience. This makes the teaching material much easier to understand. It remains fun to see the penny drop with students and course participants.”

He prefers to work in a master-family situation. “The actual craftsmanship is not taught at university; that has to happen in practice. That is very labor intensive and the first hours of the apprentice are not productive. In the long run, however, it actually saves a lot in product development, because specialists with expertise solve problems in time.”

As a consultant in machine dynamics, Nuij therefore adheres to the master-mate principle. “I have long been doing assignments for mapping and analyzing vibrations in machines. At a company, I always ask for a young guy who would like to work in that field. I show them ‘on the job’ how and why you do it. I also get requests for courses. Then I can nicely refer to my course on experimental techniques and other courses that bridge to control engineering.”

Transfer from clapper to clock

Key to Nuij’s specialty is the transfer function. “If you perform an action on a system, what response comes out of it? Take a church bell. What difference in pitch, timbre and reverberation time do you hear when you excite this system in a different way with the clapper? Or the camera you hold in your hands. The harder you shiver when printing, the fainter the picture. If you shiver differently, the photo will be blurred in a different way. You describe all this with the transfer function; it helps you predict the new output when you have a different input. If I stand next to an electron microscope that magnifies a million times, you will see blurring in the image. The transfer function then describes how the acoustic coupling translates into the image.”

The ETM training at High Tech Institute revolves around determining the transfer function experimentally. “We describe that, following the Eindhoven tradition, in the frequency domain (how often does something happen?). In principle, the function contains the same information as in the time domain (when does something happen?), but it is presented in a different way, which gives different insights.” Mathematically, the Fourier transform is used for this purpose. The course goes into depth about it, because many mistakes are made with it.

Of course, experimental skill is also required: choosing sensors wisely, being able to assess the quality of a measurement and recognizing possible errors in the setup. “The control technician behind the computer must also have knowledge of what can go wrong experimentally, from a wrongly set input sensitivity to an overload somewhere in the system.”

This article is written by Hans van Eerden, tech editor for High-Tech Systems.

Trainers Kees Verbaan and Hans Vermeulen on the fun of training. They look back on the passive damping training at ASML in Wilton, for which they received the highest trainer score in 2022.

Kees Verbaan and Hans Vermeulen, the two High Tech Institute Teachers of the Year 2022, were surprised with their award. But not so much about the high appreciation behind it coming from the participants of the Passive damping training at ASML Wilton in the US. ‘Our story resonated there,’ both say. Vermeulen: ‘ASML is clearly leading in terms of technology development. You see that it has really become necessary to apply passive damping. There are multiple dampers in a lithographic scanner, actually in these machines you find them all over the place.’

Technology professionals at ASML are relatively well trained and have often been involved in many complex problems. Vermeulen: ‘Teaching such a group of engineers on site implies a lot of interaction. They keep up very well in terms of knowledge level. The subject also suits them. Unsurprisingly they came with a lot of critical questions.’ Verbaan: ‘You feel the urgency. It was great fun to have discussions with them on the cutting edge. Many of the engineers also had a dynamic background, so actually all the topics of the course resonated well.’

Prof. Hans Vermeulen at Eindhoven University of Technology.

The need for trainings at ASML is driven by the large influx. ‘At all development sites they bring in a lot of people, also in Wilton,’ says Vermeulen. ‘When I was there for ASML Research in 2017, they had about 350 development engineers on the payroll. I think that number has quadrupled by now.’

The main purpose of the trainings is to get everyone in the organization speaking the same language. ‘Starting mechatronics engineers follow the same curriculum of four basic training courses. The basic ‘Mechatronics’ training part 1 and 2, ‘Dynamics and modeling’ and ‘Passive damping for high tech systems’.’

Passive damping is the most recent one. The field of knowledge is on the rise because traditional design methods based on masses and springs alone are no longer adequate enough for the latest demands. In the past, it was not necessary. For a long time, technical designers found head room to increase resonance frequencies through lighter and stiffer structures to achieve required precision. But we are running more and more towards limits. ‘Therefore, we started to reduce vibration amplitudes at resonances by means of damping,’ Vermeulen says. ‘It is an element you have to build in carefully. The goal is to extract energy from a system to reduce unwanted vibrations. But it can come at the cost of your positioning accuracy if you don’t apply it properly.’

Should every mechanical engineer in a high-tech company know about it?

‘In any case, it’s good to be aware of it. In civil engineering, damping has been applied in skyscrapers and bridges for decades already.’ Vermeulen finds it difficult to draw a comparison with his own field, but he still sees things going wrong these days. ‘There are sometimes resonances in airplane wings and bridge decks that could have been avoided if the relevant analyses would have been done, as for example for the London Millennium Bridge. Whatever field you come from, as an engineer it’s good to know how to apply it. But it starts with sound mechanical design. The moment you need it, it’s handy to have it readily available.’

Verbaan: ‘Not everyone needs to be able to implement it in full detail, or be able to fully calculate it. But a good understanding of how to create lightweight and stiff structures, after which you might apply damping to get to an optimal result, is something I think you need to have.’

Dr. Kees Verbaan at Eindhoven University of Technology.

Verbaan says about the fun of the training: ‘It’s great fun when you understand a subject yourself and then witness that someone is really getting the message. That generates a lot of enthusiasm in that person, but also for myself.’

Vermeulen says he recognizes this. ‘I very much like to get things really across. The training is also designed with that goal in mind. We discuss how to deal with damping mathematically, about mass, spring and damping matrices. But in addition, very early in the course, participants practice with an elementary case on how to reduce the vibration amplitude of a mass-spring system say by a factor of one hundred in ten cycles through dissipation of energy. Then it sinks in what it means to apply damping.’

Verbaan: ‘They start thinking: ‘What does that mean’?, and then rapidly see what a damper really does and what definitions mean that go with it. In this way, we awaken the interest they need to tackle in other cases later on.’

Besides the elementary basics, the two also cover design and modeling, and a practical exercise to implement it themselves. In addition, also how participants can apply it in their own practice. ‘That combination creates a very nice interaction,’ Verbaan says. ‘Some engineers are very much into modeling, others have more practical experience. We see a lot of interaction between participants there, and we get a lot of energy from that.’

What is the interaction like in the passive damping trainings with open enrollment?

‘There we see more mixed and diverse groups,’ Verbaan says. ‘There it is sometimes more challenging to get everyone to join in immediately on every single topic. For materials scientists, the experience is much different from someone who is used to work with complex dynamic models. In Wilton, all the topics resonated well with all the people.

This article is written by René Raaijmakers, tech editor of High-Tech Systems.

Despite a host of up-and-coming alternatives, C++ is still a force to be reckoned with, certainly in the legacy-fraught high-tech industry. Drawing from almost 25 years of experience, computer programming enthusiast Kris van Rens introduces coding rookies to the language basics and essential best practices in his new C++ Fundamentals training at High Tech Institute.

 

Over the years, a long list of programming languages has been put forward to supplant C++. D, Rust, Apple’s Swift, recent Google addition Carbon and lesser-known alternatives like Nim and Vale, to name a few – they all have their merits and their specific application areas. Nonetheless, C++ is still very much alive and kicking, contends computer programming enthusiast Kris van Rens.

“There’s this widely held view that you shouldn’t use C++ because it’s outdated,” says Van Rens. “But it’s actually this view that’s outdated. It’s based on old-style C++. Ever since modern C++ was born in 2011, the language has kept moving with the times. With the right provisions, it’s no less relevant than up-and-coming alternatives like Rust.”

In the new 4-day training course “C++ fundamentals,” organized by High Tech Institute in the last two weeks of March, Van Rens introduces participants to the language basics and essential best practices. “I aim to impart a positive vibe about C++. I want participants to leave feeling that they can really do something with it and knowing how to put it to good use.”

Check out his C++ training

 

Bread and butter

Van Rens has been captivated by the wonderful world of programming ever since he first laid his hands on his dad’s ZX Spectrum home computer. “It was a machine from 1983, the year I was born. When I was 7 or 8, I started tinkering with it, using the Basic programming language. In high school, in an extracurricular activity, a fellow student taught me X86 real-time assembly, followed by C and then C++. In the past few years, I’ve been delving into Rust as well.”

After a bachelor’s in mechatronics at Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences in Krefeld, Germany, Van Rens did a master’s in electrical engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology (TUE), specializing in video coding and architectures under the supervision of professor Peter de With. “The university is where I became a software engineer and had my first taste of teaching. In parallel to my graduation project, which was about converting MPEG-2 into H.264 video streams, I created an image and video coding tutorial – for my own understanding but also just for the fun of it and to convey that fun to others. Spreading my enthusiasm has always been an important driver for me.”

In 2009, Van Rens started his professional career at his current employer, the smart surveillance specialist Vinotion. At the time, this TUE spinoff was still a startup, working from an office space belonging to De With’s research group. “From coding image analysis algorithms in C++, my focus slowly shifted to the development platform as a whole, including the language itself, the programming interfaces and the tooling. That became my bread and butter: enabling the creation of robust, high-performance, high-quality code using solid software architecture.”

Van Rens’ career in training got a leg up when he was asked to speak at one of the informal 040coders meetings for computer programmers in the Eindhoven region. “The meeting was hosted by Philips Image Guided Therapy and I did a skit about introducing kids to C++. Afterward, IGT invited me to give a serious presentation to their engineers. So I did a tryout on an in-depth C++ topic. They liked it so much that it’s grown into a quarterly event – so far all online, due to Covid, with me presenting from my attic to crowds as big as 150 people.”

 

Encounters with legacy

The new C++ classroom training at High Tech Institute is targeted at much smaller groups of max a dozen software engineers with basic programming skills – any language will do. It’s also much more hands-on, with practical exercises drawn from Van Rens’ 10+ years of industrial experience. “These exercises aren’t theoretical and made-up like I’ve seen in so many other courses. They’re real industrial cases, inspired by the problems I encounter in my daily work.”

A key concept addressed by Van Rens is the craft of systems programming. “When you’re writing embedded software for a high-tech system, you’re much closer to the hardware than when you’re creating a web application,” he points out. “In Javascript, for example, you generally don’t have to concern yourself with things like memory management; the interpreter takes care of that for you. In an embedded system, you do have to worry about the often limited resources and how to use them wisely. Systems programming is all about being aware of the intricacies on all levels and having the flexibility to act accordingly. The training provides the handles for that. This knowledge applies to any systems programming language.”

''A lot of legacy is written in some older version of C++.''

The omnipresence of legacy code in the high-tech industry is another reason why C++ and his training are so relevant, notes Van Rens. “A lot of that legacy is written in some older version of C++. Sooner or later, you’ll come across this code. Rewriting it or programming against it in Rust or another language is almost never a viable option; you’ll have to deal with it in C++, and my training will help you do that.”

To be prepared for legacy code, participants obviously need to know a thing or two about old-style C++, but the emphasis is on the safe, modern aspects. “After the first standardization in 1998, the language didn’t change much for a long time. It wasn’t until 2011 that C++ underwent a true metamorphosis with the introduction of modern concepts like smart pointers for safer memory usage. Since then, the language is regularly updated, and so are the best practices,” explains Van Rens. “My primary focus is on the state of the art. Later on in the training, I also equip the participants for their inevitable encounters with old-style C++ by going into the evolution of the language and providing exercises in which pieces of legacy code have to be rewritten using modern constructs.”

 

Supercharged learning

The fundamentals taught by Van Rens in the upcoming training are more than enough for participants to get off to a flying start, but they’re only a fraction of what there is to tell about C++. “It’s a huge language. I use the book “Beginning C++20” by Ivor Horton and Peter Van Weert as a reference during the course. It’s comprehensive, almost a thousand pages long, but even that’s not nearly enough to cover everything, not by a long shot. In four days, I aim to lay a solid foundation, showing participants the ropes and where to go if they want to dive deeper.”

''Nothing beats learning by doing.''

Books and online tutorials only get you so far. Nothing beats learning by doing, maintains Van Rens, pointing to the added value of classroom teaching. “Working with C++ since 1998, I’ve built up almost 25 years of experience that I’m amply sharing in class. I’m not just explaining the language; I know where to put the right emphasis, supporting my story with relevant best practices, examples and exercises from industry. It’s supercharged learning.”

This article is written by Nieke Roos, tech editor of Bits&Chips.

The 2021 ASPE Lifetime Achievement Award that Jan van Eijk received last year marks the symbolic end of the active career of one of the driving forces behind the Dutch mechatronics industry in recent decades. In part 2 of an extensive interview, Van Eijk looks back and gives some valuable advice for the Dutch high-tech industry. “It is crucial to maintain and feed the network.”

 

In the Netherlands we like to pat ourselves on the back with how good we are in mechatronics and precision technology. Are we really world class or is it Dutch arrogance?

“I don’t think we need to be too modest about that. In any case, there is little arrogance about it because there are enough points with which you can illustrate that. Not only in terms of knowledge, but also in terms of industrial application, we have built up a major lead over the rest of the world. ASML’s machines are a wonderful demonstration of this, but Thermo Fisher’s transmission electron microscopes are also technical marvels that are hardly unparalleled in the world. And it all comes from the same network, the same community of people who have taken technology to the next level.”

'The willingness, or even the obligation, to share knowledge in the network is crucial.'

 

How did we achieve that level?

“The basis of this lies with Philips and the Natlab. The optics knowledge that has been built up there forms an important pillar. The machine building and mechanics capabilities also play a major role, as does all the know-how surrounding the construction principles for which Wim van der Hoek laid the groundwork. At its core, it revolves around the Natlab, where people could conduct scientific research at the highest level and link it to implementations in a practical application. The latter in particular has been decisive, plus the fact that that knowledge has been shared with others and that we have built an ecosystem in this way.”

“That willingness, or even the obligation, to share knowledge is crucial. A wonderful example are the famous Thursday morning lectures at the Natlab. There, researchers explained to the rest of the lab what they were doing, and what their plans and ambitions were. And it wasn’t just about what great successes they had achieved, but also what they wanted to do in the future. Employees were obliged to attend, and this created cross-fertilization in a collaborative environment. Colleagues who had virtually nothing to do with a field, nevertheless, asked questions. This curiosity to learn about each other’s profession has led to us not only building up the capacities, but also sharing that knowledge with a larger group, and learning to appreciate and respect each other’s fields.”

“Another example is the BM Landjuweel, where the 150 most prominent people within Philips Bedrijfsmechanisatie met every year to tell each other what they had learned and where things had gone wrong. It was an honor to be invited.”

“When BM got into a frenzy in the mid-eighties, those Landjuwelen stopped. They were followed by annual Philips conferences that alternated between control and mechanical topics. With the same goal: to make contacts and exchange technical information. That role has since been taken over by, among others, DSPE and the training programs of Mechatronics Academy and High Tech Institute.”

Check out the mechatronics trainings

Prof. Jan van Eijk.

 

Is the region sufficiently aware of the importance for knowledge sharing?

“Especially in economically difficult times, it is hard to convince people that you might have to organize such meetings maybe even twice a year, because it is essential to maintain and nurture that network. It is one of the core values that has been an assignment for all executives within Philips since the era of famed director Hendrik Casimir. Philips is no longer such a central player, but the philosophy is quite deeply embedded in our community. The trick is to guarantee continuity in the rat race to earn money. That requires some effort. I think it is sufficiently embedded, but I have often been accused of being too naive.”

 

In recent years, ASML has taken over the dominance of Philips. How do those companies compare, the Philips of then versus the ASML of today?

“Unlike Philips, ASML is a mono company, focused on one application field. That’s a big difference. Within the old Philips, questions arose from all kinds of domains that were often based on the same basic problems. As a result, a specialized knowledge center could come up with excellent solutions for both electron microscopes and placement machines for discrete components.”

“When working at Philips, I have done pre-development work for ASML. Intimately connected, yet independent. That worked very well. We got a bag of money and could do whatever we wanted. We had a decisive organization that did not have to worry about the day-to-day problems within ASML. If there was a fire there, the siren went off and all ASML staff had to show up. But there was no siren at Philips; we could quietly work on their next problem. Planar motors are a good example of this. At first, ASML didn’t see any point in that, but we just started working on it anyway. When they saw what we had developed a year later, it was immediately snatched from our hands because those motors had to get into all kinds of machines quickly.”

'ASML shouldn’t get arrogant because it’s the best at something. In my opinion, the organization is bureaucratizing quickly.'

“The current ASML is huge. I’ve said before that they have to be careful that they don’t become another Big Blue. That it, like IBM, will neglect some domains. ASML shouldn’t get arrogant because it’s the best at something. In my view, the organization is rapidly closing down and bureaucratizing. If they’re not careful, it will soon clog up with too many people sitting there just to safeguard their own jobs. If ASML falls into that trap, it will be very difficult to keep up the technical drive.”

“As an outsider, you have absolutely no chance if you want to make an improvement proposal. Internally there are so many experts in all kinds of fields that an entire army will jump up to explain why your idea is not possible. For an innovator like me, it is not a nice organization to work for; I don’t get any energy from it. On the other hand, ASML’s successes are undeniable.”

AI no panacea – The Netherlands is at the forefront of mechatronics and precision technology, but we are too small to do everything. Which markets and sectors should the Netherlands focus on?

“There are very interesting possibilities in machines for photonics. A new field that is very related to the production machine problems that we’ve already solved in existing systems. With many of the same companies we can make a positive contribution and claim part of that industry for the Netherlands. However, we shouldn’t try to become the production center. Don’t aim to be Samsung or TSMC in photonics. The focus should be on developing equipment for that sector.”

“Another area in which we can benefit from the technology base that has been built up, is robotics. The football-playing robots from the Eindhoven University of Technology are a nice example of that, but we really have a solid base to score high in robotics. Think of medical and surgical robots, because they also contain that high-tech precision component.”

And automotive, could that be interesting? There are many companies around Helmond, among others, that operate in that market.

“I’m not sure whether the Netherlands is big enough to play a leading role in automotive. Superpowers such as Bosch and the car manufacturers themselves are very dominant. We can certainly make important contributions with smart innovations, but we are not in a position to have a major industrial part. We may have missed the boat there. But even if we had done everything we could twenty years ago, I wonder whether we would have been able to gather enough manpower in the region. We can’t carry another ASML-sized company in the Netherlands.”

 

 

And artificial intelligence?

“That is mainly a buzzword for me, just like mechatronics was 35 years ago. You can attract money with it, but above all we have to keep our feet on the ground and not expect that all problems will be solved if we use AI. I don’t believe in that. AI is an interesting tool from which you can certainly derive value, as well as from CAD and finite element methods. I think AI can provide valuable insights that might help you better understand what is happening. This will allow you to improve devices effectively. If you only do data-based optimizations, you will only make limited profit. But if you understand the core of the problem, you can come up with new concepts. In any case, AI is certainly not a panacea.”

 

From a distance – The award of the 2021 ASPE Lifetime Achievement Award last November marks the end of your active career. What else do you want to do?

“Mechatronics Academy regularly gives fun training courses in Asia or America. If a nice location comes along, I would be happy to contribute. Companies can always knock on my door if they are looking for innovative solutions. Then I would like to join in to think along in the preliminary phase. After half a year I’m worthless because then I’m just going to say that it could have been better. Also when engineers are at a loss because their machine isn’t working properly and they have no idea why, I like to think along. Maybe I can help out. Not because I know better, but because I ask the right questions from a distance that help gain insight.”

Go to mechatronics trainings

“Other than that, not much has really changed. Just like the past ten years, I go on holiday very regularly. With the camper through Europe or to the US. I also play golf and bridge. I can keep doing that for a long long time.”

 

Jan van Eijk’s most important patents

Jan van Eijk has about fifty patents to his name. What are the two most important?

“I came up with one of my first patents together with Martin van den Brink. If you asked him this question, he would probably mention this patent as well. It is about the alignment of the mask and the wafer in a lithography machine. In ASML’s first machines, this was done with an optical system that compared one point on the mask against two points on the wafer. That means you can never control the rotation nor correct the magnification of the lens. Our invention was to add a second feature. Although that second optical measuring system made it twice as expensive, the big advantage was that you could measure the position and the angle perfectly, without being dependent on the stability of the machine frame. You could also correct the magnification of the lens based on the distance between the two mask features on the wafer. That was a very valuable step for ASML because it made sure that the first generation were guarded as a stable, well-producing machine, with a yield that was a factor of 2 to 3 higher.”

“Another important patent dates back to 1990 and deals with frame motion compensation. If you let a wafer stage make a step, a reaction force is generated on the machine frame. That frame will start vibrating which will lead to image errors. You can solve this with control technology by adding extra sensors and using smart feedforward tricks. But the mechanics themselves are not infinitely rigid. In the second generation of lithography machines, the structure had become so large and heavy that ASML ran the risk of low-frequency vibrations that were detrimental to the quality. You can of course wait for the vibrations to damp out, but that’s killing the productivity. We then came up with the idea of installing three DC motors between the machine frame and the floor. When the stage moves, those motors generate a force that compensates for the movement, causing the frame to stand still. It seems simple, but it has enabled the second generation of ASML machines to reach high positioning accuracy and throughput. That has been of decisive importance because from that generation onwards ASML started to make real money and they were on fire.”

 

This article is written by Alexander Pil, tech editor of High-Tech Systems.

Jon Holt, Incose fellow and professor of systems engineering at Cranfield University, is sharing his 30-year experience in model-based systems engineering in the MBSE training course that will be offered in collaboration with High Tech Institute. “It’s not about technology, it’s about business change in a technical environment.”

 

Is model-based systems engineering a hype? “MBSE isn’t just the latest great idea,” replies Jon Holt, professor of systems engineering at Cranfield University. Holt states that there’s a genuine need to improve the way the tech industry works to remain competitive. “To produce products and services that we can trust. So that the general public can have trust in us engineers. MBSE is a very good way to achieve that.”

Holt will start as a trainer for the MBSE training at High Tech Institute in the Eindhoven region. Ger Schoeber, responsible for the systems training portfolio at High Tech Institute, is happy to have him on board. “Jon was identified as one of the 25 most influential system engineers in the last 25 years by Incose, the International Council on systems engineering,” says Schoeber. “He’s internationally recognized as an expert in the field of model-based systems engineering and has authored 17 books on the subject.”

Check out the MBSE training

According to Holt, “MBSE isn’t really that new or radical. It’s just an evolution of classic systems engineering, just like our systems have evolved. They’re all going to be connected in some way. Almost every system is now part of a wider system of systems, which ten to twenty years ago wasn’t the case. As this complexity increases, we also need to improve the way we do things in systems engineering. To me, MBSE is a natural evolution of traditional systems engineering.”

Trainer Jon Holt.

 

UML and SysML

In 1999, Holt started teaching how to use models in engineering for The Institution of Engineering and Technology. In his courses, he used UML (Unified Modellng Language) that was aimed at the software industry – SysML (System Modeling Language) didn’t exist yet. The main aim of the training was to try and convince people that modeling was a good idea. “Only about fifteen years ago, modeling became more widely accepted in engineering. The question changed from why should we model to how should we model? What are the techniques we need? How do we model effectively and efficiently?”

About five years ago, Holt experienced another transition. “Modeling became widely accepted and used in industry. The main question now is: how do we successfully implement model-based systems engineering in our business? How do we deploy it? Initially, many people just saw it as the latest buzzwords, but now, as our systems become more complex, there’s a genuine need to do this.”

 

How can companies benefit from MBSE?

“It really depends on what it is you want to achieve. Some people want to shorten their development timelines. Some want to improve the product quality or their communication. Some people want to improve their relationships with customers, suppliers and the tendering process. For some organizations, it comes down to things like compliance. In markets like medical devices, the main concern is compliance with regulations and standards. Different organizations have a different emphasis. It really depends on your business goals.”

'You need to understand what your key stakeholder expectations are and what success looks like.'

“You have to bear in mind that you’re talking about business change. For that, you need to understand what your key stakeholder expectations are and what success looks like. What are the problems that you have at the moment? What are the benefits that you’re looking to achieve? You need to know if MBSE makes a difference for you. Would you have been equally successful without it?”

 

If MBSE means business change, where do you start if you want to implement it?

“It all starts with having a very clear picture of what you’re setting out to achieve. What’s your current position in systems engineering and what’s your goal? Where do you want to be? It’s like any business change. In the first place, you have to know why you want to do it.”

“The emphasis of your company is a good starting point for the transition you want to achieve. This will be different for producers of medical devices than for semiconductor equipment manufacturers.”

 

What’s the biggest pitfall?

“One of the biggest pitfalls is that people just go out and start to buy technologies and solutions. They’re essentially buying solutions to a problem that they don’t understand. That’s never going to be a particularly good outcome.”

 

 

 

How does the implementation of MBSE typically evolve?

“You need to start small and grow it out into the business. It’s about evolution. You start on a small part of a project or maybe a pilot project to demonstrate the benefits of the improvements. And then you can grow that out into the rest of the business.”

'The more senior buy-in you can get, the smoother it goes.'

“Your speed obviously does depend on the level of investment, but also very important are commitments from the people in the organization. As a crude measure, the more senior buy-in you can get, the smoother it goes. This will often mean that you get key stakeholders involved and show them what the benefits are.”

 

Joining the course isn’t enough. Your employer and team also h ave to be committed?

“Absolutely. You need to have a strategy in place and that strategy needs to have a timeline. You need to be aware of the time, effort and money that you need to invest. Depending on your original goals, you can realize the benefits very quickly. Sometimes it might take a year, but in many cases, you can win back any investment you make in the first project or the first implementation.”

“You have to be realistic. This isn’t an overnight activity. It’s an evolution from where you are now to where you want to be. Anticipating your expected goals and also how you’re going to demonstrate that you’ve met those goals. You need to know what success looks like, so you need to know how to measure that. It’s about the road to get there.”

 

Five stages

Holt identifies five stages on the road to full model-based systems engineering. “We have a scale of five maturity levels. It’s a path from working with documents, improving the way people work with the help of models, to full model-based systems engineering. Depending on the organization and the investment, it takes four to six months to get halfway to level three. That’s when you’re actually applying models properly. That’s also when you start to see immediate and measurable improvements.”

It might take eighteen months to two years to get to full automation with tooling and advanced applications, Holt reckons. “But at that stage, you’ll be able to see patterns roll out across the business and so on. It’s an evolution. You can consider each stage as a checkpoint to see if you’ve succeeded.”

The starting point for a transition to MBSE is understanding what you want to achieve. “For that, organizations have to look at the big picture and prioritize the effort they want to put in to get the optimum benefits,” says Holt. To get there, he guides people through five main aspects of MBSE in his course. “It allows them to focus on the aspects that are of most interest to them. They might have quite a lot of experience in some of the areas but typically not in all of them.”

'The goal of MBSE isn’t to produce a model, it’s to realize the system successfully.'

The first area is the system. “At the end of the day, the goal of model-based systems engineering isn’t to produce a model, it’s to realize a system successfully. The way to do that is by collecting all of the relevant, all of the necessary information into the model. The system and the model are our day job if you like. That’s what we’re working on.”

Alongside that, the information needs to be visualized. “We need this to be able to communicate with different stakeholders. So this is where things like notations come in – SysML, UML, mathematical notations, whatever.”

Tooling has to be considered as well. That’s the third aspect. “Obviously, tools are needed to implement MBSE.”

The fourth area is the approach. This is where people usually lack experience. “Historically, when we talk about defining an approach for systems engineering, it’s been about defining processes. This is still absolutely crucial. But we have to separate the information that we produce and consume in our processes from the steps that we must take to execute the process. This is where the framework comes in, as the framework gives us the blueprint for the model and the model is our single source of truth for the information. So when we talk about the approach, it’s a combination of the processes we need to execute and the information we produce and consume – this is what we refer to as the framework.”

The fifth and final area is compliance. “What standards do you need to comply with? What legislation? What are your certification requirements? For aerospace, automotive and rail, certification is crucial. If we can’t certify our systems as being safe, secure and reliable, we can’t run them.”

All these five areas combined will result in model-based systems engineering. They’ll give organizations the power to maximize their techniques and practices. The starting point will differ from organization to organization. Some might be strong in tools or compliance, but not so strong in the approach. “We look at these five areas from their current position and their goals. That gives us the main input for understanding where you are on the evolutionary MBSE scale and what would be the best strategy to implement MBSE.”

Not every organization has to reach the full model-based maturity level. “Going fully model-based isn’t for everybody. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t benefits to reaching the ‘model-enhanced’ or ‘model-centric’ stage. It’s about understanding what your benefits are. What do you actually need and where should you possibly spend our money on? It’s a mistake to invest too quickly in frameworks, standards, tools and notations. You should know why in the first place. Unfortunately, the classic situation still exists where people start spending hundreds of thousands of euros on tools and solutions for problems they don’t understand. Companies buy tools, give them to the engineers and assume that everything will work from that point on. That’s not going to lead to optimal benefits. You first have to understand your problems. It’s a transition. It’s traveling down that road and having the checkpoints along the way.”

Training setting with Jon’s flipchart notes on the wall. 

 

If commitment from higher management is so important, would you say the course also benefits higher management?

“Absolutely. We see all sorts of different people getting involved with the training. Obviously, system engineers and more traditional disciplines like electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, software and so on. But also a lot of managers, even at the very senior levels, and people who don’t consider themselves as engineers like scientists, mathematicians and psychologists. We also have one-day courses aimed more at management or senior people. We intend to also schedule them with High Tech Institute in the future.”

“Not every aspect of MBSE is going to be beneficial to everyone involved. By knowing what you understand, you’re able to focus. If consistency of information is a big problem, you probably need to look at your framework. If people are more mature in their way of working, sometimes it comes down to improving the way they’re using their tools or their notations.”

 

Do participants need to have a technical background?

“It helps, but we don’t assume any prior knowledge. We start with the absolute basics, give real-life examples and then look at the problems we have. Then we move on to examples.”

Jon Holt during one of his MBSE trainings.

Register for training

 

What do participants take home?

“You can’t expect to go on a three-day training course and be an expert in the field. But you will have a very strong awareness of what it’s all about, what’s in it for you and where you can go next. If you want to pursue MBSE, you’ll know what the next steps are.”

“We also show different applications, how you can get different benefits and different value from applying different aspects of the modeling. Because it’s not just about products or systems. You can also use MBSE to improve your processes, your projects, your lifecycles and all the different aspects of it.”

“At the end of the course, people will be in a position to say: ‘Actually, I think I can benefit from MBSE in these areas.’ It will give them a direction on where to go next. In many cases, they want to improve their business and therefore want to improve their products or services, for example, which they then go on to develop.”

“People get a very clear understanding of MBSE from the training, but they will also explore how they can apply it in different situations. From the basics of modeling to things like interfaces, requirements modeling and understanding business change.”

“Participants aren’t going home as world experts, but they will have an understanding of MBSE and see what the benefits are for them. They’ll know where to go next.”

You can sort out a lot about MBSE yourself by reading books and search the internet. But joining Jon Holt’s three-day course will save you months of research and give you a head start. He has spent thirty years of his career putting MBSE in practice. One of the big advantages of the training course is being face to face with him. You can ask direct questions about MBSE in your industry. You’ll get all the answers. His training is intended to be as interactive as possible. He doesn’t just do a lecture in front of the class, he’s delivering an interactive experience and gets everybody involved – a relatively quick way to learn the basics.

Holt brings up some other benefits: “What’s interesting is that you get to see other people from other industries. You get the appreciation that you’re not alone. These other people have a similar problem. Industries might differ, but the problems are similar. Sharing different experiences can be very, very powerful. More than once, you’ll realize: oh, I’m doing nothing wrong; other people are in the same situation.”

“In every course, I get lots of questions I’ve heard before, but there’s always a few I’ve never heard in all my thirty years of MBSE. For me, that’s part of the joy of delivering the courses. It challenges me as well, and it makes sure that I stay on top of my game. That’s exciting, and of course, I shouldn’t be standing at the front if I can’t answer unexpected questions.”

 

This article is written by René Raaijmakers, tech editor of Bits&Chips.