Meet Marcel Verhoef

Current and Past Activities


I joined the European Space Agency in February 2015, where I work as a Flight Software Engineer in the Software Systems division, Directorate of Technology, Engineering and Quality (TEC-SWF) at ESTEC, Noordwijk (NL).

My focus is on applied formal methods to support the model-based design and analysis of space systems, in particular software requirements, fault detection, isolation and recovery (FDIR), real-time operating systems, schedulability, time and space partitioning and multi-core. I am coordinating several research activities in these domains and I provide software engineering support to the CHEOPS satellite, due to be launched in October 2019.

I worked for CHESS (Computer Hardware & System Software) from 1999 to 2015, a small / medium enterprise based in Haarlem (NL) specialized in the development of high-end computer based systems for business critical applications, developing both hard- and software in house, product development for OEMs and other high-tech customers. Since 2014, this company moved its main focus entirely to MyriaWise: a groundbreaking smart wireless and secure fully meshed network technology that is self-organizing, scalable, low power and robust, with applications in smart lighting.

I have successfully completed (of course together with many colleagues and in close cooperation with our customers) substantial system engineering projects for clients such as NEONE (their certified BCT One Boordcomputer Taxi product), the Dutch Department of Defense, the Flower Auction at Aalsmeer (real-time auction clock system), the European Space Agency (proposal handling system of the Integral mission), Oce Technologies (wide-format printing calibration subsystem) and Siemens VDO Automotive (now known as TomTom; in-car radio navigation system architecture and real-time embedded middleware for their high-volume multi-media OEM platform).

I was a member of the CHESS innovation team and worked for four years in the BODERC research project at the Embedded Systems Institute. This project (from September 2002 until March 2007) was aimed at developing and improving multi-disciplinary design methodologies for real-time and distributed embedded systems. I obtained my doctoral degree at the Radboud University Nijmegen, on the work performed in this project. My promotor was prof. dr. Frits Vaandrager and my co-promotor and thesis supervisor was prof. dr. Jozef Hooman.

Through Chess, I was also involved in the Quasimodo Seventh Framework EU project on quantitative analysis of embedded systems (from January 2008 until April 2011) and the DESTECS FP7 project (from January 2010 until December 2012) on co-simulation to support multi-disciplinary system design. DESTECS was a direct follow-up to my own PhD research, which led to the publication of a book and a tool which provides a coupling between Overture and the continuous time simulator 20-sim. This strand of research was continued in the INTO-CPS project, under the EU Eight framework (Horizon 2020).

Last but not least, I participate in and still contribute to the Overture open-source formal methods tools project, supporting the Vienna Development Method (VDM).


Refereed Academic Conference and Journal Publications



Have a look at my entry in the DBLP Computer Science bibliography database.

Books and book chapters


From left to right: John, Marcel (me), Nico, Paul and Peter.