Dr. Bentley Oakes

Office M-4107, Pavillons Lassonde

Polytechnique Montréal

2700 Chemin de la Tour

Montréal, QC, Canada H3T 1J4

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer and Software Engineering (GIGL) at Polytechnique Montréal, Canada, where I lead the Oakes Lab. Polytechnique Montréal is affiliated with the Université de Montréal. I completed my Master’s and PhD at McGill University, before becoming a post-doctoral researcher at both the University of Antwerp and the Université de Montréal.

I am an Associate Academic Member of Mila – Quebec AI Institute and a researcher in the artificial intelligence consortium IVADO.

My research focuses on tools and methods that help domain experts model, construct, and reason about complex systems, with a particular emphasis on Digital Twin engineering. Recent recognized work includes contributions on ontological service-driven engineering of Digital Twins and systematic reporting frameworks.

Research interests

I enjoy working across a variety of research fields, in collaboration with academic and industrial partners:

digital twins, including their structure, construction, and reporting
representations of domain-specific knowledge, such as ontologies and ontological reasoning
verification and validation of cyber-physical systems, including formal verification
the application of machine learning to cyber-physical systems
model-driven engineering techniques
model transformations and their verification

Across 40+ peer-reviewed papers, my research appears in flagship venues in two communities: in model-driven engineering, including MODELS, and SoSyM; and in software engineering, including TOSEM, FSE, ASE, MSR, and ICPC.

Our research is generously supported by:

Discovery Grant

Accelerate

News

Oct 13, 2026	MODELS and EDTconf 2026 in Málaga MODELS and EDTconf 2026 in Málaga, with a Best Short Paper award for Kérian Fiter, two talks, a tutorial on DTInsight, and the onto:Nexus 2026 workshop.
Oct 13, 2026	BRIC-DT: Reliable Interfaces for Composable Digital Twins EDTconf 2026 vision paper on contract-aware interfaces for digital twins: each component states what it assumes and what it guarantees, with evidence checked at design, deployment, and runtime.
Oct 13, 2026	Building Trustworthy Enterprise Digital Twins with Michelin EDTconf 2026 Best Short Paper on engineering trustworthy Enterprise Digital Twins with Michelin: involve stakeholders with a prototype first, federate departmental models through an ontology, and make long-loop decisions traceable.
Oct 09, 2026	SEMTL is becoming SERIQ, a new software engineering research centre for Québec. It starts with four universities: Université de Montréal, Polytechnique Montréal, McGill, and ÉTS. Benoit Baudry is the director, and Houari Sahraoui championed the centre. I am proud to have restarted SEMTL in 2022 and to have helped secure support for SERIQ. I will co-lead the cyber-physical systems axis with Aren Babikian and Francis Bordeleau. Come find out more at the Rentrée SERIQ on 29 October at Université de Montréal, and register by 23 October.
Oct 05, 2026	I have been accepted as an Associate Academic Member of Mila – Quebec AI Institute. I’m excited to further my involvement with the Mila community, and to explore the intersection of AI and Digital Twins.

see all 40 news items →

Service and teaching

I enjoy my time as reviewer and program committee member for software engineering journals, conferences, and workshops, and have been recognized for these contributions with multiple best reviewer awards.

I am on the steering committee of SERIQ, Québec’s inter-university software engineering research centre, where I co-lead the cyber-physical systems axis. SERIQ continues the Software Engineering at Montreal (SEMTL) meetings, which I led from 2022 to 2026.

LOG8421E — Engineering of Digital Twins — Offered each Winter at Polytechnique Montréal

This hands-on undergraduate and graduate course covers the theoretical and practical principles of Digital Twin (DT) engineering for cyber-physical systems. Students work with an open-source incubator case study across six lab sessions, exploring DT architecture, co-simulation, visualization, machine learning, and formal verification. In team projects, students design and build their own DT or DT service. Course projects have included DTs for beer fermentation, smart city traffic management, robotics, and permafrost monitoring.

→ Full course page: schedule, projects, and student presentations

Academic background

Previously, I was a post-doctoral researcher at the GEODES lab in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research of the University of Montréal for two years. My research topic was on the modelling of domain-specific machine learning workflows.

Before that, I was a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp in Belgium for three years. I worked on a variety of topics along with industrial partners as part of the Flanders Make strategic research centre, including verification of cyber-physical systems, configuring of co-simulations, and developing conceptual frameworks for digital twins.

I received my PhD at McGill University in 2019 on the topic of model transformation verification. During this period, I was an instructor for the Introduction to Programming course at McGill. I also was a visiting researcher at the General Motors Technical Center in Michigan, USA and the fortiss research institute in Munich, Germany.

During my bachelor’s degree at the University of Manitoba, I held three internships as part of the co-operative program. The first internship was at BlackBerry (formerly Research in Motion) in Waterloo, ON. The topic of this internship was on cryptographic communication protocols. The second and third internships were at Electronic Arts in Montréal, QC. These internships focused on prototyping artificial intelligence solutions in video games.

Selected Publications

ISWC
Bridging the Semantic Web and Model-Based Systems Engineering with the Ontological Modeling Language

Maged Elaasar, Bentley Oakes, Eduard Kamburjan, Mohammad Hamdaqa, and Abdelwahab Hamou-Lhadj

In The Semantic Web – ISWC 2026, Oct 2026

Accepted for publication; author pre-print available.

Abstract PDF DOI Bib

Summary

The Ontological Modeling Language (OML) is an ontology description language that stems from applying the principles of ontological modeling in the systems engineering (SE) field. SE has specific requirements on tooling and methodology that have hampered the adoption of Semantic Web technologies in this field. In particular, we identify as challenges the lack of rigorous semantics for SE models, and the lack of a well-established methodology for effectively using ontologies in SE. We describe OML principles through an SE example and describe an OML methodology and tooling. We also describe the status of OML adoption and usage, including projects at NASA, JAXA, Leonardo, and academia. We aim to describe OML in practice, its principles, and its tooling for the semantic web community, such that best practices can be exchanged more easily between the two communities.

Keywords: Systems engineeringOntology engineeringKnowledge graphsSemantic reasoningModel-based systems engineeringOML
@inproceedings{Elaasar2026OML, author = {Elaasar, Maged and Oakes, Bentley and Kamburjan, Eduard and Hamdaqa, Mohammad and Hamou-Lhadj, Abdelwahab}, title = {Bridging the Semantic Web and Model-Based Systems Engineering with the Ontological Modeling Language}, booktitle = {The Semantic Web -- ISWC 2026}, year = {2026}, month = oct, series = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science}, publisher = {Springer Nature Switzerland}, keywords = {Systems engineering, Ontology engineering, Knowledge graphs, Semantic reasoning, Model-based systems engineering, OML}, note = {Accepted for publication; author pre-print available.}, }
EDTconf
Involving before Evolving: A Vision for Trustworthy Enterprise Digital Twin Engineering

Kérian Fiter, Adil Lagrou, Franck Dervault, and Bentley Oakes

In ACM/IEEE 29th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems Companion (MODELS Companion), Oct 2026

Abstract PDF DOI Bib

Best Paper

Slides Summary

EDTconf 2026 Best Short Paper

Enterprise Digital Twins (EDTs) promise data-driven decision support at organizational scale, but realizing them requires navigating siloed departments, tacit knowledge, and high-stakes decisions with long-horizon consequences. Existing approaches involve domain experts during model development but focus less on early organizational buy-in in EDTs. We present a vision for trustworthy EDT engineering grounded in an ‘involving before evolving’ paradigm: rapidly involving stakeholders through a working prototype before evolving toward federation and full interoperability. Our three-stage approach combines foundation models for rapid prototyping, an ontological backbone for federated interoperability, and observability tooling for stakeholder trust. We ground our vision in an ongoing collaboration with Michelin, a multinational manufacturer, where an initial prototype has helped support stakeholder buy-in.

Keywords: Enterprise Digital TwinDigital TwinWhat-if AnalysisUncertaintyTrustFederationOntologiesFoundation ModelsLarge Language Models
@inproceedings{Fiter2026, author = {Fiter, K{\'e}rian and Lagrou, Adil and Dervault, Franck and Oakes, Bentley}, title = {Involving before Evolving: A Vision for Trustworthy Enterprise Digital Twin Engineering}, booktitle = {ACM/IEEE 29th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems Companion (MODELS Companion)}, year = {2026}, month = oct, pages = {1--5}, doi = {10.1145/3837062.3839094}, keywords = {Enterprise Digital Twin, Digital Twin, What-if Analysis, Uncertainty, Trust, Federation, Ontologies, Foundation Models, Large Language Models}, }
EDTconf
DTInsight: A Tool for Explicit, Interactive, and Continuous Digital Twin Reporting

Kérian Fiter, Louis Malassigné-Onfroy, and Bentley Oakes

In 2025 ACM/IEEE 28th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems Companion (MODELS-C), 2025

Abstract PDF DOI Bib

arXiv Poster Video Code Website

With Digital Twin (DT) construction and evolution occurring over time, stakeholders require tools to understand the current characteristics and conceptual architecture of the system at any time. We introduce DTInsight, a systematic and automated tool and methodology for producing continuous reporting for DTs. DTInsight offers three key features: (a) an interactive conceptual architecture visualization of DTs; (b) generation of summaries of DT characteristics based on ontological data; and (c) integration of these outputs into a reporting page within a continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline. Given a modeled description of the DT aligning to our DT Description Framework (DTDF), DTInsight enables up-to-date and detailed reports for enhanced stakeholder understanding.

Keywords: digital twinssoftware visualizationsoftware documentationdecision-makingontologiesOMLmonitoring
@inproceedings{Fiter2025, author = {Fiter, K{\'e}rian and Malassign{\'e}-Onfroy, Louis and Oakes, Bentley}, title = {{DTInsight}: A Tool for Explicit, Interactive, and Continuous Digital Twin Reporting}, booktitle = {2025 ACM/IEEE 28th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems Companion (MODELS-C)}, year = {2025}, pages = {139--143}, doi = {10.1109/MODELS-C68889.2025.00030}, keywords = {digital twins, software visualization, software documentation, decision-making, ontologies, OML, monitoring}, }
SIMULATION
Toward a Systematic Reporting Framework for Digital Twins: A Cooperative Robotics Case Study

Santiago Gil, Bentley Oakes, Cláudio Gomes, Mirgita Frasheri, and Peter G. Larsen

SIMULATION, 2024

Abstract PDF DOI Bib

Video Code

Digital Twins (DTs) can be constructed for many different applications, leading to substantial differences between different case studies. To be able to learn from the challenges and lessons learned by other DT practitioners, it is important that experience reports be consistent to facilitate comparisons. In this paper, we merge three reference description frameworks for DTs, one generated from a systematic mapping study, one generated from an analysis of experience reports, and one from a systematic literature review, to come up with a unified characterization of DT applications. This analysis has identified six non-overlapping and three cross-cutting characteristics in the reference frameworks. This paper showcases the unified characterization with 21 characteristics to report on a DT case study called the Flex-cell, a manufacturing cell with two robotic arms used for cooperative assembly. The generalizability of this unified characterization is validated using a multi-case approach with another case study in robotics and another in the food industry. We call on the DT community to integrate these systematic reporting principles in their future DT experience reports such that other practitioners can learn from each other more effectively.

Keywords: Digital TwinExperience reportRobotic systemMobile RoboticsTaxonomyCo-simulationModeling and simulation
@article{Gil2024towardssystematicreporting, author = {Gil, Santiago and Oakes, Bentley and Gomes, Cláudio and Frasheri, Mirgita and Larsen, Peter G.}, title = {Toward a Systematic Reporting Framework for Digital Twins: A Cooperative Robotics Case Study}, journal = {SIMULATION}, year = {2024}, volume = {101}, number = {3}, pages = {313--339}, doi = {10.1177/00375497241261406}, keywords = {Digital Twin, Experience report, Robotic system, Mobile Robotics, Taxonomy, Co-simulation, Modeling and simulation}, publisher = {SAGE Publications}, }
EDTconf
Towards Ontological Service-Driven Engineering of Digital Twins

Bentley Oakes, Claudio Gomes, Eduard Kamburjan, Giuseppe Abbiati, Elif Ecem Bas, and Sebastian Engelsgaard

In Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 27th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems Companion (MODELS-C), 2024

Abstract PDF DOI Bib

Best Paper

Slides Video

EDTconf 2024 Best Short Paper

The systematic engineering of Digital Twins (DTs) requires the establishment of clear methodologies supported by intelligent tooling. We propose an approach to guide the user in the creation and deployment of services for DTs utilizing ontologies and workflows. In our approach, the user selects a desired DT service from an array of options. This selection is then used to suggest a) enablers and models to place in the DT, and b) development and deployment workflows for the DT service. The aim is to provide DT engineering guidance to assist non-software engineering experts to develop DT services more rapidly with less effort. We describe our initial work on applying this approach to a derived version of an industrial wind turbine generator case study, utilizing openCAESAR for ontology definition and enacting the workflows with Jupyter notebooks.

Keywords: digital twinsontologiesDT serviceswind turbine testingguided software engineeringrecommendationworkflows
@inproceedings{Oakes2024ServiceDriven, author = {Oakes, Bentley and Gomes, Claudio and Kamburjan, Eduard and Abbiati, Giuseppe and Bas, Elif Ecem and Engelsgaard, Sebastian}, title = {Towards Ontological Service-Driven Engineering of Digital Twins}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 27th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems Companion (MODELS-C)}, year = {2024}, pages = {464--469}, doi = {10.1145/3652620.3688261}, keywords = {digital twins, ontologies, DT services, wind turbine testing, guided software engineering, recommendation, workflows}, }
MODELS-C
openCAESAR: Balancing Agility and Rigor in Model-Based Systems Engineering

Maged Elaasar, Nicolas Rouquette, David Wagner, Bentley Oakes, Abdelwahab Hamou-Lhadj, and Mohammad Hamdaqa

In 2023 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems Companion (MODELS-C), 2023

Abstract PDF DOI Bib

Website

Model-Based System Engineering (MBSE) employs models and formal languages to support development of complex (systems-of-) systems. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) sees MBSE as a key approach to managing the complexity of system development. However, balancing agility and rigor in MBSE has been reported as a challenging task not yet addressed by modeling tools and frameworks. This is because existing MBSE approaches may enable agility but compromise rigor, or enhance rigor but impede agility. We discuss the challenges of balancing agility and rigor in MBSE across seven systems engineering architectural functions defined by the JPL Integrated Model-Centric Engineering (IMCE) initiative. We demonstrate how openCAESAR, an open-source MBSE methodology and framework created at JPL, can strike a balance between agility and rigor through a case study of the Kepler16b project and discussion of lessons learned from past projects.

Keywords: Systems EngineeringModel-Based Systems EngineeringOntology-based ModelingOMLopenCAESAR
@inproceedings{Elaasar2023opencaesar, author = {Elaasar, Maged and Rouquette, Nicolas and Wagner, David and Oakes, Bentley and Hamou-Lhadj, Abdelwahab and Hamdaqa, Mohammad}, title = {{openCAESAR}: Balancing Agility and Rigor in Model-Based Systems Engineering}, booktitle = {2023 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems Companion (MODELS-C)}, year = {2023}, doi = {10.1109/MODELS-C59198.2023.00051}, keywords = {Systems Engineering, Model-Based Systems Engineering, Ontology-based Modeling, OML, openCAESAR}, }