Mohsen Alirezaei

This postdoctoral project at Eindhoven University of Technology focuses on optimization-driven verification and validation for precision machines such as semiconductor equipment, metrology systems, and advanced manufacturing tools. The aim is to uncover rare but critical “unknown-unsafe” operating scenarios before machines are built, so that high-tech systems can be qualified more efficiently and with greater confidence. You will extend a V&V framework that was originally developed for automated driving and adapt it to precision machinery. At the core of the project is a multi-modal evolutionary search approach that is designed to find a compact and diverse set of critical scenarios rather than a single worst case. Your research will translate V&V questions into optimization problems that incorporate operating conditions, disturbances, parameter uncertainty, and interacting error sources. The work also includes developing dissimilarity measures and coverage metrics to quantify how diverse the discovered scenarios are and how much of the machine operating space they cover. Methods will be validated through a tiered workflow using software-in-the-loop experiments on parametric digital twins and hardware-in-the-loop testing with fault injection. The postdoc will be based in the Dynamics and Control group in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. A key part of the role is contributing to VISTA Lab (Verification, Inspection, Simulation & Testing Automation), a new initiative focused on automation for verification and validation of complex engineered systems. The position is also strongly connected to industrial collaboration, with real use cases translated into models and demonstrated in practice. The role sits at the interface of methods development, simulation, experimentation, and technology transfer in a highly interdisciplinary environment. The successful candidate will also contribute to supervising PhD and Master’s students and to joint grant proposals with industry. Overall, the project supports faster, more trustworthy qualification of high-tech equipment and strengthens the European semiconductor and high-tech ecosystem.