Faces behind HECTOR School: Prof. Reussner gives insights

Tell us more about you and your research area:

What area are you working in?

My research is twofold: on the one hand I am working on the foundations of software design as an engineering discipline. This means that we develop methods to predict the quality of software even before its programed. This allows making architectural design decisions right in terms of supporting performance, scalability, reliability or security. Here, we import methods, such as model-based prediction, from “classical” engineering disciplines (like mechanical and electrical engineering) into software design. On the other hand, we want to research how software engineering methods can be applied in systems engineering in general. As software is playing a more dominant role in basically any modern technical product, we also see the chance and need to make their engineering methods more software-driven. So we look at algorithms allowing different experts to work seamlessly together without requiring that a single expert has the full understanding. Here methods from software engineering like distributed databases, software versioning, and formal methods are applied to models of non-software artifacts. 

Which industries do you support with your research?

Generally, we support all industries building complex engineering artifacts. However, here in southwestern Germany, our partners are Daimler, but also tier one companies like Bosch (with ETAS and itk Engineering) and ZF. Vector informatics as a software tool provider for vehicle engineering is a natural cooperation partner.

Thinking about your research area and the influences on industry, environment, or the society, what are the risks/what are you worrying about?

“Software eats the world” as Marc Andressens said. That means that software realized business models more and more push other business models aside or even replace them. For our car industries, which are also so important for our societal welfare, this “software eats the world” means that they have to face the challenge that most value creation on cars is done by the software already now and this will even increase. In addition, the business model changes from solely making money through selling cars to making the most money with software updates on existing cars. Hence, they need to transform themselves into automotive software companies in order to survive the next decades.

Thinking about your research area and the influences on the industry, environment, or society, what are the opportunities and what makes you feel optimistic?

Digitalization is already now transforming our economy and society. We will lose classical jobs. In order to create new jobs here, we need highly skilled engineers with substantial software engineering knowledge. KIT and the HECTOR School within the International Department are doing a very good job of training such engineers. This gives me hope that new digitalization-induced jobs will be created here in Germany, in the southwest.

What are you particularly proud of? / Your greatest success:

The Palladio software architecture simulator initiated in a research project in 2003 is now a publicly available open-source tool used by several companies, once software quality (in particular performance) is an important success factor. Statements like “Palladio saved us millions of EURO” or “we now use it regularly in our development process” and academic awards from ACM, IEEE, and others for our research in our tool shows what is true for the whole KIT: academic excellence and practical impact can go very well together.