Research

This website presents selected research topics and related publications. The full list of publications is available from my publications website.

Automotive Systems Engineering

Developing software for automotive systems has become increasingly complex. Sophisticated driver assistance, collaboration, and Car2X-communication systems as well as advanced active and passive safety-systems result in complex, software-intensive automotive systems. As these feature-driven subsystems may be arbitrarily combined by the customer, a huge amount of distinct variants needs to be managed, developed, and tested. Thus, we are carrying out numerous projects in automotive software engineering, here we concentrate on the modeling of functional [DRW+20] and logical [KRW20, BKRW19] architectures for collaborative systems [BBD+21], on managing variability [KRSW20], and on model-driven testing [DGH+19].

Selected Publications

Industry 4.0

Industry 4.0, the fourth industrial revolution, raises new challenges for future manufacturing which are driven by four disruptions: (1) data volumes, computational power, and connectivity; (2) the emergence of analytics and business-intelligence capabilities; (3) new forms of human-machine interaction; (4) and improvements in transferring digital instructions to the physical world, such as advanced robotics and 3D printing. One of the most promising concepts of Industry 4.0 are digital twins, integrated digital data, models, and services that foster a better understanding of the production systems of Industry 4.0 and a more sustainable handling of resources. We, therefore, conduct research on modeling languages in Industry 4.0 [WBCW20], on the efficient management of manufacturing data [SHH+20], and on the systematic conception, engineering, and deployment of self-adaptive digital twins [BDH+20, DMR+20, KMR+20].

Selected Publications

Robotics

Deploying robotics applications requires expertise from multiple domains, including general software engineering and the application domain itself. Consequently, successful robotics applications are developed by teams of software experts, robotics experts, and application domain experts. The conceptual gap between application domain challenges and implementation domain solutions gives rise to accidental complexities from solving problem domain challenges with programming domain details. This complicates development and may lead to failure. Domain and robotics experts are rarely software engineering experts. Their involvement in the software engineering of reusable robotics applications requires that they become software experts or that implementation details can be abstracted. To enable the efficient engineering of robotics systems in heterogeneous teams with experts from manifold domains, we conduct research on the model-driven development of service robotics software [RRRW15b, ABH+16, ABH+17, AHRW17b] and robotic manufacturing [THR+13, BRS+15]

Selected Publications

Software Language Engineering

Identifying or engineering appropriate languages for the various activities in software and systems development is one of the most important issues in Software Engineering. Programming and modeling languages are still subject to improvement. In various domains, it is appropriate to employ Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) to enable non-software developers to specify properties, configuring their systems, etc. in terms of established domain concepts and corresponding language elements. With increasing digitalization, we expect a growth in DSLs and increasing efforts in their efficient engineering, integration, and composition. But designing DSLs is challenging, because, on one hand, they need to be precise enough for being processed by a computer and, on the other hand, comprehensible by humans. The monolithic design of a language can already benefit from methods for language engineering in the small including design guidelines and tooling. Therefore, we conduct research on the systematic engineering [BPR+20] of (domain-specific) modeling languages and reusable modeling language libraries [BEH+20] leveraging concepts from component-based software engineering [Wor19] and software product lines for a variety of different domains [BW21].

Selected Publications