Center for Advanced Systems Engineering

Center for Advanced Systems Engineering

The key to innovation strength and competiveness in the future

Traditional software and systems engineering is on the verge of a turning point. To date, the focus has been on ensuring the reliability and safety of relatively small, centralized and automated systems operating in predictable environments. Current and future requirements are increasingly shifting toward the trustworthiness of larger, dynamically-connected, self-learning and continuously self-adapting systems that often respond autonomously.

These systems typically feature a high proportion of software, which enables powerful functions that go far beyond what was once possible with mechatronic systems that operate more in an isolated environment. The high software ratio and corresponding possibility to add new and modified functions, even during runtime, harbors enormous market potential and significant competitive advantages for pioneering companies.

The fortiss Center for Advanced Systems Engineering is thus pursuing the goal of creating as consistent a design framework as possible in order to develop advanced software-intensive systems across the entire life cycle in a values-oriented and manageable manner. Apart from industrial technology leaders, the focus here is also on small-to-medium enterprises that have recognized that software is a vital element of their value chain. In close collaboration with our partners from industry and business, we are developing a targeted portfolio of research, development and transfer services and serve as an expert training partner.

Dr. Holger Pfeifer

Your contact

Dr. Holger Pfeifer

+49 89 3603522 29
pfeifer@fortiss.org

Services

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Regular events featuring scientific and practical presentations regarding current trends and developments in advanced systems engineering. Various formats are available for use as a meeting point for sharing information and discussing diverse subjects.
 

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Organization and moderation of meetings to share experiences related to the introduction or application of advanced systems engineering. These meetings present an opportunity to identify gaps in methods and engineering. The network also offers the possibility to discuss application-wide topics and create new networks.

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Wide range of training and education measures such as seminars and training programs on advanced systems engineering topics that ensure the transfer of new scientific findings to employees in the company.

 

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Initiation and coordination of research projects for solving current challenges in advanced systems engineering. The results are then prepared and made available for practical application.
 

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Scientific-based analysis of selected aspects of advanced systems engineering (in particular process landscapes, requirements, architectures, software, tools) that were developed in specific/individual companies/organizations.

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Assessment and evaluation of companies by independent experts from science regarding the values-oriented development of software-intensive systems. Answers to important issues on the basis of a targeted transformation process that also takes into account necessary organizational changes if applicable.

Challenges

Advanced software-intensive systems represent a tremendous challenge for traditional systems engineering given that they spawn completely new requirements:

Despite major scientific and practical strides in these areas over the past several years, there remains a lack of scalable applications, as well as a shortage of suitable reference models, open standards and support tools.

  • Heavily-intertwined development processes of the participating engineering disciplines such as computer science, machine engineering and electronics engineering
  • Continuous development and provisioning under dynamic conditions
  • Distributed, dynamically-organized and heterogonous development teams
  • Increased demands on quality, safety and compliance
  • Algorithmic transparency, accountability and responsibility owing to increasingly autonomous and decentralized software structures
  • Heavily-intertwined data- and model-driven development methods
  • Developent of software-intensive systems with learning-based AI components
  • Agile systems engineering, even for mission- and safety-critical systems

Expertise

The center’s services are based on the results of a series of national projects related to the manageable development of software-intensive systems. The resulting advanced systems engineering framework helps numerous partners to design the development of software-intensive systems in a manageable and resource-efficient manner.

Here the special focus is on agile development principles, high variability requirements, the reuse of legacy components from prior subsystems, the integration of an asset library and the management of product lines.

The Center for Advanced Systems Engineering incorporates these principles into a consistent approach and using this as a foundation, provides a clear and scalable methodology.

    Further informationen

    [Translate to English:] fortiss Whitepaper Advanced Systems Engineering
    Advanced Systems Engineering
    Download pdf - german
    [Translate to English:] fortiss Whitepaper Praxisnahe Einführung von Model-based Systems Engineering
    Praxisnahe Einführung von
    Model-based Systems Engineering
    Download pdf - german