Internship-/graduation assignment - Generative Pre-trained Transformer

Location: Delft, Netherlands

About us

With 80.000 talents working in 68 countries, we are one of the biggest high-tech employers in the field of safety and security. In the Netherlands, where 2800 employees are based, we are located in seven cities: Huizen, Amersfoort, Rotterdam, Delft,

Breda, Eindhoven and Hengelo (HQ). Together with an extensive ecosystem of knowledge partners, customers and suppliers, we work on radars for naval vessels, cyber security solutions, transportation systems, communication equipment for land forces, cryogenic cooling solutions, research & development for radar tech (in collaboration with TU Delft).

Information about the department:

The Naval System Engineering department is responsible for the entire development cycle of our radar products, services and solutions, consisting of concept definition, system design, system integration and validation.

Within the Naval System Engineering department, the Solution Engineering Group performs all system engineering activities for the realization of a mission system on board of naval ships. This includes all integration activities with various subsystems, such as sensors, effectors, communication and navigation systems. The Solution Engineering Group has two teams: a main team in Hengelo and an affiliate team in Delft. For the team in Delft, we are looking for an enthusiastic and motivated intern. Join us in an absorbing assignment taking you through all stages of software engineering in an environment setup for learning and mentoring!

About the assignment

One of the methods that Thales employs to support our integration activities is Model Based System Engineering (MBSE): engineering based on a virtual (abstract) representation of the mission system. To perform MBSE Thales uses a software application based on the open-source Capella software.

MBSE methods and toolsets can store a virtual representation of a complex mission system (in essence a database). This puts in place the necessary structure to use Large Language Models (LLMs) to help users intuitively and efficiently access large databases.

The virtual representation can be used for support as well as automation of the entire engineering documentation, formalization of the operational needs and reuse from previous projects.

Alongside automation, support may be another possibility for analysis, aiding thorough the development process, with suggestions, advice or highlighting potential issues. All possibly from completely different industries within Thales, working on the same systems engineering process, asked at a high level and explained in detail.

The internship assignment requires the identification of stakeholder needs, an analysis of how current LLMs can address some of them within the MBSE framework, a proposal for a proof of concept with regards to the need’s analysis, followed by implementation and testing. This entails discussions with stakeholders, documentation of needs and systems engineering, software development/testing, as well as demonstration to the engineering community.