Model-based Systems Engineering
Making complex systems safe and manageable through modelling
Model-based Systems Engineering
Motivation
Cyber-physical systems are characterized by complex and highly interacting requirements, functions, and subsystems. The interaction of these mainly software-defined products, such as cars or airplanes, with other systems and with our physical world leads to a high level of complexity and places high demands on their safety, reliability, and performance. Due to continuous functional enhancements, bug fixes, security updates and adaptations to new system contexts (e.g., for data-based components), system development extends over the entire product life cycle, which leads to a further level of challenges.
Research focus
In the Model-based Systems Engineering competence field, we therefore develop innovative modeling approaches, methods, and tools for the continuous development of cyber-physical systems. Our research focuses on (semi-)automatic model-based methods in the following key areas:
- Analysis and optimization of system architectures
- Simulation-based testing at system level
- Structured reuse and product line development
- Analysis and management of model quality and consistency
To ensure practical relevance and industrial applicability, we evaluate our domain-independent research results primarily in the automotive, aviation and industrial automation domains.
Services
Our offer is aimed at small, medium-sized, and large companies in the supply chain of cyber-physical systems (e.g., suppliers, system integrators, OEMs) as well as providers of engineering tools. It includes in particular:
- Application-oriented research on model-based processes for the continuous engineering of cyber-physical systems (e.g., collaborative research at state, federal or EU level or directly contracted)
- Development of modeling approaches, methodologies and tool prototypes based on advanced methods (e.g., formal methods, simulation, data-based analyses) and standards (e.g. SysML, FMI)
- Access to the fortiss Mobility Lab, which makes our approaches tangible using a realistic automotive use case based on fortiss open-source solutions
- Prototyping and scientific evaluation of customized innovative approaches (e.g., tool prototypes, use cases, testbeds)
- Training offers for industrial users, e.g., hands-on training on MBSE basics and selected advanced topics, as well as webinars and seminars in the area of our research focus
Whitepaper
Engineering
The systems of the future
to Model-based Systems
Engineering
Procedure and lessons learnt
Open source tools and training material
AutoFOCUS 3
Model-based development of embedded systems
Model-based development of complex systems through powerful methods for analysis, optimisation and verification.
Smart Factory Information Tool
Making variability manageable in production
Mastery of complex variant production for rapid, model-based verification of manufacturability in flexible smart factories.
SPEDiT
Training material for model-based development
Training material for model-based development
Contact
fortiss Lab
Projects
Publications
- A Systematic Approach to Fault Injection Test Case Generation in Practice In Software Engineering and Advanced Applications. SEAA 2025., volume 16081 of LNCS, pages 201–218, 2025. Springer. Details DOI BIB
- A Failure Model Library for Simulation-based Validation of Functional Safety In Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Computer Safety, Reliability and Security (SAFECOMP), volume 14988 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2024. Springer, Cham. Details DOI BIB
- Mitigating Conflicts in Architectural Design Decisions for Evolving Manufacturing Systems: Evaluation and Recommendations for Practitioners In 29th International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA), Padova, Italy, 2024. IEEE. Details BIB
- Modular Consistency Checking Between Heterogeneous Models Without Direct Data Exchange Between Collaborators In ACM/IEEE 27th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS Companion ’24), 2024. ACM. Details DOI BIB
- Towards the Estimation of Quality Attributes on System Model Histories In ACM/IEEE 27th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS Companion '24), 2024. ACM. Details DOI BIB
- Generic Analysis of Model Product Lines via Constraint Lifting arXiv:2008.11427 [cs.SE], 2024. Details DOI BIB
- OpenSBT: A Modular Framework for Search-based Testing of Automated Driving Systems In Proceedings of the 2024 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings, pages 94–98, 2024. ACM. Details URL DOI BIB
- A Toolchain for Synthesizing and Validating Safety Architectures SN Computer Science, 4(4):335, 2023. Details DOI BIB
- Early Assessment of System-Level Safety Mechanisms through Co-Simulation-based Fault Injection In 2022 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV), pages 1703-1708, 2022. IEEE. Details DOI BIB
- Exploring Architectural Design Decisions in Industry 4.0: A Literature Review and Taxonomy In Software Engineering 2022 - Fachtagung des GI-Fachbereichs Softwaretechnik, 2022. Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI). Details DOI BIB
- Towards Service Deployment and Composition in Industry 4.0 In IEEE International Conference on Emerging Technologies And Factory Automation (ETFA), 2021. IEEE. Details DOI BIB
- Safety Case Maintenance: A Systematic Literature Review In Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Computer Safety, Reliability and Security (SAFECOMP), volume 12852 of LNCS, pages 115–129, 2021. Springer, Cham. Details DOI BIB
- FASTEN: An Extensible Platform to Experiment with Rigorous Modeling of Safety-Critical Systems Domain-Specific Languages in Practice, ():131–164, 2021. Details DOI BIB
- RMC Factory: A New Approach for Avionics Software Reuse In 3rd Workshop on Avionics Systems and Software Engineering (AvioSE21, SE 2021 Satellite Events), volume 2814, 2021. CEUR-WS. Details URL BIB
- Hardware architecture exploration: automatic exploration of distributed automotive hardware architectures Software and Systems Modeling, 19():911–934, 2020. Details DOI BIB
- Distributed Real-Time Architecture for Mixed-Criticality Systems: Modeling and Development Process CRC Press, 2018. Details DOI BIB
- DREAMS Toolchain: Model-Driven Engineering of Mixed-Criticality Systems In Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 20th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS '17), pages 259–269, 2017. IEEE. Details DOI BIB
- Software Deployment Analysis for Mixed Reliability Automotive Systems TU München, 2017. Details URL BIB
- AutoFOCUS 3: Tooling Concepts for Seamless, Model-based Development of Embedded Systems In ACES-MB&WUCOR@MoDELS 2015, . CEUR-WS.org, 1508 edition, 2015. Details URL BIB