Automotive and Intelligent Transportation Systems 

The automobile and transport sectors play key roles for the economic process of both Germany and Europe. The automobile sector accounts for a fifth of the total turnover of the German economy.It is complemented by the logistics sector, which is placed third in the turnover ranking. Introducing novel advanced driver assistance systems, embedding vehicles into intelligent transportation systems, and the increasing interconnectedness of vehicles, their environment and the Internet bears new challenges that involve distributed systems, IT security, and privacy.

Industrial Control Systems (ICS)

The automation of technical processes in various branches are increasingly driven by computer systems. At the same time, automation systems are more and more connected to other systems of the industrial IT landscape. This leads to new challenges in IT security, as shown by incidents such as the Stuxnet worm which targetted Iran's nuclear facilities. Recent trends include the integration of wireless and self-organized networks as part of an ICS. We provide thorough expertise for securing such networks in the context of ICS. 

Cloud Computing 

Cloud computing provides resources on demand and on a fine-grained pay-per-use model. This enables new business models and allows service providers to flexibly handle varying demand of clients. Our work targets the design and creation of more versatile and less restrictive cloud systems that support arbitrary communications patterns and module compositions. We also regard cloud-based systems as an interesting field of application for fault-tolerance by incorporating fault-tolerant mechanisms into cloud services. 

Service-Oriented Business Applications 

Many business applications are implemented using service-oriented architectures, which allow the creation of complex systems through service composition. Modern large-scale business applications are the result of integrating several interacting sub-services instead of a single monolithic application design. Hence, business applications constitute a matching use case for our research towards fault-tolerant and scalable distributed systems. Depending on the actual requirements, services can be designed to match different levels of resilience and load adaptively.