Welcome

Research, teaching, and innovation at the Dependability of Software-intensive Systems (DSiS) group is inspired by the fact that in many areas of our daily lives, software has become one the main drivers of innovation. This means that dependability (including safety, security, reliability, availability, and performance) of systems strongly depends on the quality of the software. Our research on dependability of software-intensive systems has the vision of software engineering principles and methods integrated into systems engineering to systematically model and analyse software-intensive systems. This results in two major research lines: On the one hand, we work on a scientific foundation of software design in an engineering sense: We should be able to predict the consequences on design decisions prior to realization. Therefore, we work on software architecture quality analysis, which includes architecture-based simulators for performance and reliability and architecture-based analyses of confidentiality, vulnerability but also maintainability. On the other hand, we research on the extension of software-engineering-based approaches to handle complexity, and to make them applicable to non-software domains, such as meta-modelling, model- and view-based development, and view, version and variant consistency management. Both research lines are specialized for automotive and mobility applications as well as for the Industry 4.0 domain.

01 December 2021
DSiS employee Heiko Klare received the "Baden-Württemberg Certificate" for university didactics ("Baden-Württemberg-Zertifikat für Hochschuldidaktik"). It certifies the participation at workshops, supervisions, practical coaching and individual qualification measures with a total amount of 200 teaching units. Heiko Klare specialized in developing concepts for e-learning and e-assessments. In this year, the certificates have been awarded without a formal handover.
The "Baden-Württemberg Certificate" is awarded by the center for educational development (Hochschuldidaktikzentrum - HDZ) as an association of the nine universities of Baden-Württemberg. Its goal is to further improve the didactic competences of teachers at these universities and to provide them with professional assistance during the two-year advanced training. After successful completion of three modules, the participants are awarded the "Baden-Württemberg Certificate" for university didactics.

19 November 2021
The paper entitled "Detecting Violations of Access Control and Information Flow Policies in Data Flow Diagrams" by Stephan Seifermann, Robert Heinrich, Dominik Werle and Ralf Reussner has been published in the Journal of Systems & Software. The paper is about considering confidentiality in early software designs given as data flow diagrams. The presented approach allows designers to model and analyze systems using various commonly used confidentiality policies. The paper is an open access publication.
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13 October 2021
New journal paper in Software and Systems Modeling by SDQ member Robert Heinrich and Moussa Amrani, Dominique Blouin, Arend Rensink, Hans Vangheluwe and Andreas Wortmann on Multi-paradigm modelling for cyber–physical systems.
The paper "Multi-paradigm modelling for cyber–physical systems: a descriptive framework" by Moussa Amrani, Dominique Blouin, Robert Heinrich, Arend Rensink, Hans Vangheluwe and Andreas Wortmann has been published in Software and Systems Modeling volume 20 and will be presented as a journal-first paper at the ACM/IEEE 24th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS).
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10 August 2021
Two awards and two honorable mentions have been given to members of the Institute of Information Security and Dependability (KASTEL). The association of software engineers in Karlsruhe (Verein der Karlsruher Software-Ingenieure e.V./VKSI) award students for excellent bachelor’s and master’s theses every year. This year, Larissa Schmid (from the group Modelling for Continuous Software Engineering, Prof. Anne Koziolek) receives the VKSI award for an excellent thesis on foundations of software engineering. Her master’s thesis has the title "Modeling and Simulation of Message-Driven Self-Adaptive Systems". Sebastian Hahner (from the group Dependability of Software-intensive Systems, Prof. Ralf Reussner) receives the award for an excellent thesis in applied software engineering. His master’s thesis has the title "Domain-specific Language for Data-driven Design Time Analyses and Result Mappings for Logic Programs". Honorable mentions for their final theses go to Dominik Fuchß and David Monschein.
VKSI homepage
19 May 2021
Dr.-Ing. Heiko Klare successfully passed his defence with highest honors.
Photo by Dominik Werle
His dissertation on "Building Transformation Networks for Consistent Evolution of Interrelated Models" is available online.
KITopen
7 April 2021
The 18th International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA'21) awarded the ICSA'21 10-years Most Influential Paper Award to the paper "PerOpteryx: automated application of tactics in multi-objective software architecture optimization" by Anne Koziolek, Heiko Koziolek, and Ralf Reussner.
ICSA is the premier venue for practitioners and researchers interested in software architecture, in component-based software engineering and in quality aspects of software and how these relate to the design of software architectures. ICSA has a strong tradition as a working conference, where researchers meet practitioners and software architects can explain the problems they face in their day-to-day work and try to influence the future of the field.
ICSA 2021 Homepage