Alexander Ahlbrecht

German Aerospace Center (DLR) | DLR · Department of Safety Critical Systems & Systems Engineering

Die Komplexität von sicherheitskritischen Systemen ist seit jeher gewachsen, aber besonders in den letzten zwei Jahrzehnten mit dem Anstieg von Komponenten, Funktionen und Interaktionen. Traditionelle Entwicklungsprozesse stehen dementsprechend vor großen Herausforderungen. Sie müssen die Sicherheit der Systeme unter steigender Komplexität und Zeit...

Urban Air Mobility introduces safety-related challenges for future avionics systems. The associated need for increased autonomy demands novel functions based on highperformance algorithms. To provide such functionality in future air vehicles of all sizes, the trend is towards centralized and powerful computing platforms. That turns avionics into a...

This tutorial was created to provide a better understanding of how the Model-Based STPA can be executed. The Model-Based STPA is an open-source profile that was uploaded on github and serves the purpose of allowing the execution of the System-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) in a Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) environment. The recorded t...

The complexity of safety-critical systems is continuously increasing. To create safe systems despite the complexity, the system development requires a strong integration of system design and safety activities. A promising choice for integrating system design and safety activities are model-based approaches. They can help to handle complexity throug...

For complex and safety-critical avionics systems, distributed developments are unavoidable. To coordinate the fragmented development process, a seamless information exchange is necessary. A promising paradigm to coordinate the development activities is Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE). However, exchanging information with current MBSE practic...

The development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) based systems is becoming increasingly prominent in various industries. The aviation industry is also gradually adopting AI-based systems. An example could be using Machine Learning algorithms for flight assistance. There are several reasons why adopting these technologies poses additional obstacles i...

Towards the end of the 20th century, the aviation industry started to adopt the Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) architecture. It describes an airborne system with a unified design and standardized components. This allows application software to be used on various hardware modules that share common features. The previously established federated av...

Urban Air Mobility is envisioned as an on-demand, highly automated and autonomous air transportation modality. It requires the use of advanced sensing and data communication technologies to gather, process, and share flight-critical data. Where this sharing of mix-critical data brings opportunities, if compromised, presents serious cybersecurity th...

This tutorial was created to provide a better understanding of how the Model-Based STPA can be executed. The Model-Based STPA is an open-source profile that was uploaded on github and serves the purpose of allowing the execution of the System-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) in a Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) environment. The recorded tut...

In recent years, there has been significant progress in Artificial Intelligence (AI), leading to an increasing interest for integration of AI-based functions into newly developed systems. AI promises several benefits, amongst others, beyond the state-of-the-art functions and performance. However, the use of AI-techniques also introduces new challen...

The competition for market entry in emerging segments such as Urban Air Mobility highlights the need for efficient and flexible development processes. This is accompanied by the trend towards software-intensive avionics systems due to the requirement for complex and computationally expensive algorithms. Considering the successful application of agi...

Emerging segments in safety-critical domains are introducing novel challenges into today’s development approaches. Complexity increase, harsh time-to-market requirements, and evolving failure causes are only an excerpt of the multiple challenges that need to be dealt with. To address these challenges, system-theoretic approaches build a promising f...

The integration of connected and autonomous technologies in safety-critical and cyber-physical systems offers great potential in the vital application domains of transportation, manufacturing and aerospace. These technological advancements are necessary to meet the increasing demand for intelligent services, as they open doors to new business model...

Realizing desired properties “by construction” is a highly appealing goal in the design of safety-critical embedded systems. As verification and validation tasks in this domain are often both challenging and time-consuming, the by-construction paradigm is a promising solution to increase design productivity and reduce design errors. In the XANDAR p...

The integration of connected and autonomous technologies in safety-critical and cyber-physical systems offers great potential in the vital application domains of transportation, manufacturing and aerospace. These technological advancements are necessary to meet the increasing demand for intelligent services, as they open doors to new business model...

Emerging segments such as Urban Air Mobility require new safety-critical avionic systems. The complexity of these avionic systems has ever been increasing, but even more rapidly in the last two decades in form of the number of components, functions, and interactions. At the same time, demanding time-to-market requirements have to be adhered to by d...

Emerging segments such as autonomous driving require new by-wire system architectures for steering and braking. These system architectures are highly safety-critical and currently not commonly used in the automotive industry. This results in challenges for traditional development approaches. One issue is that a well-thought-out architecture selecti...

The next generation of networked embedded systems (ES) necessitates rapid prototyping and high performance while maintaining key qualities like trustworthiness and safety. However, development of safety-critical ES suffers from complex software (SW) toolchains and engineering processes. Moreover, the current trend in autonomous systems, which relie...

The next generation of networked embedded systems (ES) necessitates rapid prototyping and high performance while maintaining key qualities like trustworthiness and safety. However, development of safety-critical ES suffers from complex software (SW) toolchains and engineering processes. Moreover, the current trend in autonomous systems, which relie...