2 PhD positions: Systems and Product Portfolio development in High-Tech industry

The core task of a systems engineer/system architect is to balance a multitude of aspects like reliability, productivity, efficiency, cost and time to market in order to design coherent, well-functioning and profitable systems, regarded over the entire life-cycle. Classical Systems Engineering focusses on the system to be built (system under design, SUD). However, in the current increasingly more complex world, embedding the SUD in the organizations that develop, build and maintain families of complex systems pose additional challenges. The already challenging balancing act for the SUD becomes even more daunting as in addition to the systems related aspects, we also include the diverse and dissimilar aspects of planning, manning and funding in the development organization. This is further complicated by incomplete and sometimes inaccurate information!

Summarizing, we aim at balancing technical and organizational aspects to come to clear development goals and decisions. It is your task to develop tools, methods and approaches for this balancing that are scientifically sound and will be adopted in industry!

We are looking for two highly motivated and hardworking PhD candidates to take up these challenges. You will work in a stimulating multidisciplinary scientific environment and in industry. The challenges described require novel scientifically founded approaches, and the approaches need to work in real life. Therefore, you will spend a significant part of your time at our industrial partner where you will be involved in (system) design challenges and decision making. Specifically, you will: 1) Investigate decision making in complex system development. One researcher will look from a technical perspective, the other from an organizational and product portfolio perspective. 2) Develop novel systems engineering and architecting tools, methods and approaches to support in these decision making processes, considering their multidisciplinary nature. 3) Test and evaluate the tools, methods and approaches in a real development environment.