I’ve spent the last six years bouncing between two worlds.
At Eindhoven University of Technology I worked on dispatching and scheduling algorithms — the kind of mathematics that ends up in European Journal of Operational Research. At KMWE, a precision-manufacturing company at the Brainport Industries Campus, I’ve been on the shopfloor: connecting ERP and MES systems, building Power BI dashboards, deploying AI agents next to operators. Two halves of the same problem, but they barely talk to each other.
These notes are for the people stuck in the middle of that gap. I’m thinking specifically about plant managers, operations leaders, and engineering directors who keep being told the future of manufacturing is digital twins, agentic AI, and Unified Namespaces — but who can’t quite tell which of those will pay back, which are vendor slide-ware, and which require unfair amounts of work to land in production.
What I’ll write about
I’m aiming for one essay a month. Each one will fall into roughly one of three buckets:
- Field notes: things that worked (or didn’t) when an algorithm met a real shopfloor. Specific, NDA-respectful, with diagrams instead of equations.
- Primers: plain-English explainers of the concepts everyone’s buying without quite understanding. Unified Namespace, agentic AI on production lines, simulation-driven decision-making, RL versus rule-based dispatching.
- Slightly contrarian takes: the patterns I see vendors selling that don’t survive contact with a real factory, and the boring patterns that actually do.
What I won’t write
I won’t repackage academic papers as blog posts — those live in the publications page. I won’t write thinkpieces about the future of work or the AI revolution. And I won’t post when I don’t have something concrete to say. A monthly cadence is a floor, not a ceiling — but quiet months will stay quiet rather than getting filled.
Subscribe — or don’t
If you’d rather not check this page every month, the RSS feed is the simplest way to subscribe. A proper email newsletter is coming soon. In the meantime, LinkedIn is where I cross-post excerpts.
If you’re working on something at this intersection — research, deployment, vendor evaluation, anything — I’d genuinely like to hear about it. The best feedback loop for these notes is conversations with the people they’re written for.