Thom Badings

I am a postdoctoral research associate with the Oxford Control and Verification Group at the University of Oxford. My main research interests are broadly on the intersection between systems & control, formal verification, and AI. Between 2020 and 2024, I was a PhD candidate with the Department of Software Science at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, under supervision of Dr. Nils Jansen and Prof. dr. Marielle Stoelinga. As a researcher, I am part of PrimaVera, an academic consortium on the topic of predictive maintenance. Before starting my PhD in September 2020, I studied Industrial Engineering and Management at the University of Groningen, with a specialization in Smart Systems in Control and Automation.

Research interests

Verifying that the behaviour of complex engineering systems is safe and reliable is crucial for their deployment in the real world. For example, we want to prove that an autonomous drone will safely reach its target, that a manufacturing system will not break down, or that a power system will not congest. Such systems are becoming increasingly intelligent with more AI components, such as neural network controllers. As a result, accurately modelling these systems becomes challenging, and uncertainty about their behaviour is inevitable. Yet, engineering systems are deployed in safety-critical environments, where guarantees about system behaviour are imperative. However, traditional methods for the analysis of such systems are often incapable of dealing with this uncertainty. Thus, my research is motivated by the following key question:

How can we guarantee the performance, reliability, and safety of complex engineering systems, despite uncertainty about their dynamics and the environments in which these systems are deployed?

I am interested to answer this type of question for applications in several domains, including robotic systems, predictive maintenance, and electrical power systems.