Completed Projects

The overall objective of this project is to investigate what a good and effective model-based validation process based on the SCADE tool chain looks like. From this a concrete goal has been derived: requirement based test cases for a vehicle function shall be generated automatically. SCADE Software Architekt will be used for modelling the vehicle function and the Model Checker SCADE Design Verifier will be used for automated test case generation.

The project is carried out in cooperation with VW Braunschweig in order to emphasize the added value of formal methods for our industrial partner and to increase the acceptance of formal methods in industry as part of a more comprehensive experiment.

Contact:
E-Mail: Adina Aniculaesei

The overall goal of this project is to further develop the test case generation system already integrated with the SCADE development environment and thus significantly increase the test case coverage achieved so far. Automated techniques will be complemented by manual methods to design better test cases with regard to requirement coverage and source code coverage. A monitoring function provided by our industrial partner VW to ensure the conversion of current into power in electric vehicles serves as a practical example here. In this project, natural language requirements are converted into the formal language STIMULUS in the context of the software and systems life cycle. The SCADE Software Architect is used as a tool for modeling the vehicle function, while the automated test case generation is performed with the Model Checker nuXmv.

The project is carried out in cooperation with VW Braunschweig.

Contact:
E-Mail: Adina Aniculaesei

In den Verbrennungsprozess von Dieselmotoren gehen multiple Massenströme ein und aus. Zur Verbrennung im Motor werden im wesentlichen Kraftstoff und Luft benötigt. Um die Effizienz der Verbrennung optimal zu halten, muss ein optimales Verhältnis zwischen Kraftstoff und Luft eingehalten werden. Die Regelung des Luftmassenstroms wird durch eine Regelklappe (Aktuator) realisiert. Zur Messung des Luftmassenstroms existiert ein pulsationskorrigierter Heißfilmluftmassenmesser (HFM). Die Messgenauigkeit des Sensors zur Luftmassenstrombestimmung wird zusätzlich über Referenzkennfelder und dynamische Lernkennfelder optimiert. Nachdem der Motor den Diesel verbrannt hat, entsteht ein Abgasmassenstrom. Die Aufgabe der Abgasnachbehandlung ist ein Teil des Abgasmassenstroms über den Luftmassenstrom zurück in den Verbrennungsprozess zu führen. Dadurch wird eine Reduktion der Schadstoffen erzielt, welche aus dem Verbrennungsprozess hervorgehen, sodass die Umweltbelastung möglichst klein gehalten werden kann.

Due to the high development dynamics in electromobility, simulation tools are required in order to be able to select the most energy-efficient and economical configuration from the multitude of possible system concepts and operating strategies on an interdisciplinary and cross-departmental basis. However, since the tool landscape used in the automotive industry is very heterogeneous, it is hardly possible to carry out the required number of total vehicle simulations with reasonable effort. This is due to the lack of interoperability of the individual simulators, which generally do not allow standardized access to the libraries of the component and system models of other simulators. This is where the KISEL project steps in. The aim of the project is to develop a novel, interdisciplinary catalogue platform for component and system models based on international standards that guarantees such interoperability. This is made possible by standardized access to the model libraries of different simulators. The effectiveness of the platform will be tested by means of demonstrators for electric vehicles of the compact class and for battery-powered electric buses.

Software development in the area of embedded systems has been model-based for quite some time. This reduces development costs and minimizes the number of electronic errors with the help of more intensive early tests. In individual cases, cost and time savings of up to 50 percent are achieved with significant improvements in product quality. As part of a reference project at Siemens Mobility GmbH, a consistent modeling approach including the necessary process steps for model creation and information acquisition and validation is being developed. The aim is to evaluate the basic potentials of the model-based function specification, taking into account the organizational, methodological and technical constraints of Siemens Mobility GmbH.

Other project participants are the Institute for Construction Technology at the TU Braunschweig and the Institute of Mechanical Engineering at the TU Clausthal.

Reactive systems are of particular interest for systems engineering because they have large, non-linear state spaces. In addition, they can, at least theoretically, have infinite runtimes. There are a number of methods for checking correctness, especially for testing, simulation and formal verification.

The overall goal of this project is to apply formal verification methods to validate complex nonlinear reactive systems.The vehicle function of the exhaust aftertreatment is used  in this project as a practical application case. Specifically, the concrete task is to verify its correctness with respect to predefined, expert-based requirements under consideration of error models (e.g. sensor measurement tolerances).

The project is carried out in cooperation with VW Wolfsburg.

The car manufacturer Volkswagen has had an algorithm developed which determines the vehicle speed under the conditions of the Euro-NCAP requirements instead of on the basis of current national legal requirements. Within the project "Accurate Speed Determination" the correctness of the developed algorithm shall be checked by formal methods against the legal and NCAP requirements.

The development of cyber-physical systems requires the application of holistic simulations. In order to do justice to the complexity of these systems, we are striving for an efficient simulation methodology in the Multi-Level Simulation project. The required holistic perspective is achieved at the rough level, which is co-simulated with several models at the detail level to focus parts of the system that are of particular interest. Which parts are "zoomed in" is dynamic during a simulation run. This dynamic is taken into account on the computing infrastructure level by rolling out the resulting multi-level simulation in a cloud environment with dynamically allocated resources and thus avoiding wastage of resources.

The project "Intelligent Control Systems" deals with the application of deep learning methods to control systems. The long-term goal is the evaluation of concepts for intelligent, AI-based controllers in the automotive sector. As a first step, data-based models for hidden system states will be investigated. Different subsystems of the engine are considered as application examples.

The tasks of requirements management include gathering and documenting requirements. In the automotive sector, it is common practice for system requirements to be documented in specifications at component level only. In order to ensure their traceability and consistency, requirements from the component level are assigned to requirements from the customer level. This step is very time-consuming and error-prone, as many component requirements have to be assigned manually. The model-based development approach enables the tool-supported derivation of artifacts from different abstraction levels. The goal is therefore to develop a hierarchical modeling concept and a tool so that the structuring and derivation of requirements with modeling tools is possible across specifications.

Thermal management is a vehicle function from control engineering. Part of the function is implemented with software components so that they can be reused for different vehicle models. The software components have a large number of application parameters so that the interfaces and the behavior of the software can be configured to suit the vehicle model. The application parameters are set with DCM-XML-based tools, so that the setting must fulfill the interaction of the software components. For this purpose, the application developer manually checks the descriptions for consistency, which causes high effort. The goal is to develop an integrated modeling concept and a tool for automated consistency checking in order to reduce the effort required for the application step.

Currently under construction

Mit der zunehmenden Automatisierung der Fahrfunktionen und dem Ziel des vollständigen autonomen Fahrens werden die Anforderungen an Hard- und Software in Fahrzeugen stetig größer. In diesem Projekt wird deswegen ein Automotive OS und Komponentenmodell aufgebaut, welches von Hardware, Betriebssystem und Kommunikationsmiddleware abstrahiert. Das Komponentenmodell ermöglicht insbesondere, dass Komponenten bei Fehlern Resilienz zeigen, indem sie durch das OS im Gesamtsystem migriert, redundant vorgehalten und geupdatet werden können.

This former NTH project consisted of a total of six institutes from the Universities of Braunschweig, Clausthal and Hannover, which have joined together on the topic of digital construction. The group pursued transdisciplinary approaches using technology funded by the DFG. 

The focus of the three-year project is the development of a formless production of complex concrete components using robotic spray technology. The research project focuses on all process-relevant parameters for robot-assisted, additive fabrication of complex concrete components by means of concrete spraying. In the process, both aspects of material-appropriate processing, possible structural shaping and auto-adaptive processes in the automated production process are examined. 

The goals of the project are the development of a mixed-reality simulation framework based approach and the implementation of a database for project-related documentation.

An impression of the results obtained in the project can be found here.

BIG IoT - Bridging the Interoperability Gap of the Internet of Things
Projectwebsite

The goal of the BIG IoT project is to remove technological market entry barriers of service and application providers of the Internet of Things by exploiting the capabilities of smartobject platforms through establishing syntactic and semantic interoperability. With the technology, concepts and semantic standards, provided by BIG IoT, the basis is created to enable the second use of already existing data and establish the interoperability between the domains.
The key elements are: to provide a platform that enables the data consumer to easily discover and access data in a uniform manner using semantic descriptions.

• Standardized ways to access data from different sources in a secure way.
• Bridging the Interoperability gap between silos by a common semantic vocabulary (Aggregating data from different sources by canonical data models).
• Enabling automated intelligent devices that automatically integrate new data sources.
• Without losing control of the data. The data will always stay at the provider. And enabling the marketplace to easily scale.

The BIG IoT API offers the following core functionalities:

1. Identity management to enable users (developers, administrators) to self-register their organizations and create provider and consumer instances along with the necessary IDs and credentials.
2. Registration of resource offerings, to allow providers to offer and advertise their assets on the marketplace.
3. Discovery of resources according to consumer-defined search criteria (i.e. queries) at run-time.
4. Access to offered resources on a provider instance by means of request/response or streaming protocols.
5. Vocabulary management for semantic descriptions of offerings, queries, input/output data, etc.
6. Security management including authentication, authorization, and key management.
7. Accounting of access to resources, which allows the monetization of assets through charging and billing.

Transport robots, which not only act autonomously, but above all cooperatively in the human environment, must be able to identify a user, follow him or guide him. The fields of application of such transport robots are broadly diversified: from transport tasks in hotels, airports and railway stations to transport support during shopping.

In the iserveU project transport tasks in hospitals were regarded as central application scenarios. Due to its accessibility, the hospital environment represents a comparatively robot-friendly environment. However, this environment is highly dynamic, heterogeneous and characterized by many unpredictable situations. This promoted the project goal to develop a general solution approach for service robots in the human environment, which is transferable to many other application areas.

Together with our partners Sinosys, DHM embeddes systems, the Institut für Elektrische Informationstechnik and the Wolfsburg fire department, we developed a system for the automatic acquisition of vehicle and force information for authorities and relief organizations.

From Sketch to Model: Cooperative Modeling with Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs)

In KoMo, an automated and bidirectional translation mechanism was created from whiteboard sketches to digitally processable models and vice versa. Furthermore, the creative collaborative development work was supported by a model data management system that is able to correctly integrate parallel versions. By minimizing manual synchronization efforts, disruptive interruptions in the creative work phases were largely avoided. In addition, the automation of previously time-consuming and error-prone tasks has significantly increased work efficiency and improved the quality of the work results.

The IT investment programme was launched at the beginning of 2009 with the resolution of the German Bundestag on the "Gesetz zur Sicherung von Beschäftigung und Stabilität in Deutschland" ("Act to Safeguard Employment and Stability in Germany"). This means that a total of 500 million euros are available for investments in information and communication technology (ICT).

The IT investment programme aims to make the federal administration safer, more environmentally friendly and closer to its citizens and to sustainably strengthen the German ICT industry.

It focuses on four areas of action

•     IT security
•     Improvement of the federal IT organisation
•     Green-IT
•     Sustainability/Innovations

In the NuWi project, interviews were conducted with selected measures at regular intervals in order to be able to make a statement about the target fulfilment of the IT investment programme on the basis of the key data collected there.

For this purpose, a report is prepared after each interview phase, which determines the degree of target fulfillment.

The IT investment programme was launched at the beginning of 2009 with the resolution of the German Bundestag on the "Gesetz zur Sicherung von Beschäftigung und Stabilität in Deutschland" ("Act to Safeguard Employment and Stability in Germany"). This means that a total of 500 million euros are available for investments in information and communication technology (ICT).

The IT investment programme aims to make the federal administration safer, more environmentally friendly and closer to its citizens and to sustainably strengthen the German ICT industry.

It focuses on four areas of action

• IT security
• Improvement of the federal IT organisation
• Green-IT
• Sustainability/Innovations

Central programme management is carried out by the IT Investment Programme Project Group (PG Invest) at the Federal Ministry of the Interior.

The goal of this project is the identification of relevant key figures to measure the success of the objectives of the IT investment program. The key figures are to be collected by questionnaires and interviews for selected measures. The results of the interviews will be presented in a summary report. This project is a pilot project to show and adapt the feasibility of the concept. The findings from this project will flow into further rounds of interviews in a continuing project (NuWi).

Projectwebseite

IT Ecosystems - DemSy

The cross-sectional working topic DemSy is the application project of the NTH School for IT Ecosystems. Here, an integrated, joint demonstration scenario is developed and conceived. This is the basis for the common demonstrator, whose components are developed in dedicated work packages of the individual research projects and integrated into a demonstrator in the cross-sectional working topic DemSy. Thus, DemSy functions act as a bracket for the participating research projects. The research projects can derive their questions from the common demonstration scenarios, which represent solution approaches in the context of the application vision and implement these in an integrated common demonstrator for the demonstration and evaluation of the work results in the context of the application vision. DemSy provides a platform for the joint presentation of the project results.

IT Ecosystems - GuMIT

The cross-sectional working topic GuMIT is of particular importance. In GuMIT, a fundamental, formally sound understanding is first developed across all cooperation projects. On the basis of this precise definition of an IT ecosystem, the isolated solution approaches of the three research projects can be discussed and integrated into a comprehensive, formally sound and fundamental approach for the methodical development, provision, operation and evolution of IT ecosystems.

Rescue assistance system for disasters and major disasters.

Projectwebsite

The aim of this project was to develop a prototype which supports rescue forces in case of a disaster and illustrates the capabilities of the DAiSI middleware developed at the TU Clausthal.