Simon Knight
I am a telecommunications engineer and software researcher based in Adelaide, South Australia. My work centers on the modeling, simulation, and coordination of complex systems—bridging the gap between high-level architectural intent and technical execution.
With a background spanning engineering and economics, I focus on building tools that provide structural clarity to large-scale infrastructure. Whether I’m developing deterministic protocol simulators, high-performance graph engines, or secure multi-agent architectures, my goal is to create systems that are as understandable as they are capable.
I believe that the most effective engineering solutions come from a combination of formal research and practical implementation. Grounded in my PhD work on automated network configuration, I continue to explore how better abstractions can simplify the management of increasingly complex digital and physical networks.
Featured Work
- Network Simulator: A deterministic, tick-based simulator for validating large-scale network designs. It enables pre-deployment verification of routing protocols (OSPF, IS-IS, BGP), catching convergence and failover errors by modeling protocol-level behavior before production deployment.
- Automatic Configuration Generation: A compiler-based framework for automated network provisioning. It transforms high-level architectural intent into validated device configurations, ensuring consistency across complex, multi-vendor infrastructures through formal graph transformations.
- Network Visualization: A layout engine designed to transform dense, multi-layer topologies into clear, structured diagrams. It employs advanced algorithms to handle complex graph data, making the structure of large networks intuitive and actionable.
- Network Modeling Engine: A modern Python library for defining and querying network topologies, backed by a high-performance Rust core (NTE). It provides a type-safe API for managing network intent and generating configurations at scale.
- Brownfield Ingestion & Analysis: A framework for extracting structured intent from legacy network state. It bridges the gap between manual CLI configurations and modern automation by identifying protocol relationships and topology from unstructured data.
Background
My work is grounded in a background in telecommunications engineering and economics. I completed a Bachelor of Engineering in Telecommunications with First Class Honours and a Bachelor of Economics at the University of Adelaide.
I later pursued research at the University of South Australia, where I earned a PhD in Computer Science (2017). My research focused on the abstractions and transformations required for automated network configuration, leading to the development of the AutoNetkit modeling framework.
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