Engineering Support for Autonomous Systems

Digitalization is about to provide digital platforms for almost every aspect of life. In this project, we want to look beyond this area with a focus on development efficiency. The current believe/hypothesis is that an area of autonomous systems that drive autonomous or algorithm based businesses is next. In some areas this is already standard like financial trading platforms, search engines etc. To efficiently upgrade digital platforms to autonomous systems and their high frequent adaption new development methods need to be found. As one fundamental challenge, we must understand what customers, domains and industries need, which functionality is to be provided by our systems. Knowing this core and being able to base decisions upon this core gives us a fundamental lever for efficiently using development resources. Due to the impact of autonomous systems on our daily life, we must foster automatic measurement and evaluation of software quality with an emphasis on reliability, maintainability and correctness. Furthermore, the business need to deploy software at high pace additionally fuels the need for automatic software quality checks beyond dynamic testing, but also including analysis techniques for all types of work products as early as possible in the development process.