Are you passionate about improving the design and development of complex high-tech systems through intelligent tools and collaboration? We offer a challenging PhD position in the Systems Engineering and Multidisciplinary Design (SEMD) group at the Department of Design, Production and Management.

Failure Analysis and Risk Assessment (FARA) play a critical role in ensuring the reliability, safety, and performance of complex systems. However, current industrial practices, such as Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA), are time-consuming, rely heavily on scarce expert knowledge, and struggle to cope with uncertainty, large data volumes, and increasing system complexity.

At the same time, recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) offer opportunities to support engineers in failure analysis, risk assessment and decision-making. Yet, these technologies are not yet sufficiently reliable, integrated, or tailored for safety-critical engineering applications.

This project aims to bridge the gap between traditional engineering practices and AI-driven methods by developing human-AI collaborative approaches for failure analysis and risk assessment.

You will investigate current FARA practices at leading high-tech companies and identify limitations in existing workflows, tools, and knowledge management. Building on this, you will contribute to the design of an integrated, AI-supported FARA process and toolchain, enabling more efficient, consistent, and scalable risk analysis across system lifecycles.

Your research will focus on enabling effective collaboration between human experts and AI systems. This includes developing methods to capture and structure tacit engineering knowledge, designing explainable AI support for risk assessment, and improving how engineers interact with intelligent tools during analysis and decision-making.

Ultimately, you will contribute to the development of a collaborative platform and methodology that combines human expertise with AI capabilities to:

You will work closely with industrial partners in the Dutch high-tech sector and collaborate with researchers in systems engineering, AI, and data science. The position offers a unique opportunity to contribute to next-generation engineering practices at the intersection of Systems Engineering and Artificial Intelligence.

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