New DFG Priority Program to be Coordinated at RWTH Aachen and TU Munich

The German Research Society, DFG for short, has granted 18 new priority programs. Fundamental questions in particularly current or rising research fields are investigated in the programs.

 

The proposal for the priority program Cyber-Physical Networking was approved. The proposal was submitted by researchers from the University of Mannheim; Saarland University; the Technical Universities of Munich, Dortmund, and Berlin; and RWTH Aachen. Professor Dr.-Ing. Klaus Wehrle from the Aachen Chair of Computer Science 4 (Communicated and Distributed Systems) and Professor Dr.-Ing. Sandra Hirche from TU Munich will coordinate the new DFG priority program.

Starting in 2016, the computer science, electrical engineering, and control engineering researchers want to do interdisciplinary work together to sustainably strengthen Germany as a place of research and IT. Computer scientific and software technical components interact with mechanical or electrotechnical components in a cyber-physical system. The components communicate within the system via a data infrastructure, such as through the internet.

There are already many fields of use in many sectors, such as energy supply management, transport logistics, infrastructure systems for communications, or in age-appropriate assistance systems. The operation of cyber-physical systems requires close and reliable communication and calculation methods. These regulation processes function without human involvement and are geographically distributed and coordinated. For this reason, future communication technology, operating systems, and control circuits must be coupled closely together and with as few delays, so called latencies, as possible, in order to reliably work. The researchers wish to integrated the methods of their respective disciplines, which have been separate for the most part up until now, in order to achieve a reliable optimization.

Source: Press and Public Relations