Andreas Wortmann

Universität Stuttgart · Institute for Control Engineering of Machine Tools and Manufacturing Units (ISW)

The design of mass housing projects, with their complex array of apartment types and constraints, can be challenging for architects. Automated-organizing programs can assist in exploring various design alternatives, but the computational cost of checking all possible building organizations grows exponentially. This paper describes a method that uti...

Digital twins becoming more prevalent: They are being used to support the design, operations, and analysis of complex systems in many domains, such as automotive, agriculture, avionics, construction, or medicine, and comprise much information about the systems and processes of the twinned system. Currently, digital twins are designed and engineered...

Industry 4.0 opens up new potentials for the automation and improvement of production processes, but the associated digitization also increases the complexity of this development. Monitoring and maintenance activities in production processes still require high manual effort and are only partially automated due to immature data aggregation and analy...

Digital twins are increasingly being used for many purposes in various domains, including manufacturing, healthcare, transportation, and urban planning. To enable all of this, digital twins must be complex software systems that digitally represent and manipulate physical systems. Hence, they are equipped with extensive data, information, and models...

Robotics software is pushing the limits of software engineering practice. The 3rd International Workshop on Robotics Software Engineering held a panel on "the best practices for robotic software engineering". This article shares the key takeaways that emerged from the discussion among the panelists and the workshop, ranging from architecting practi...

Digital Twins are currently investigated as the technological backbone for providing an enhanced understanding and management of existing systems as well as for designing new systems in various domains, e.g., ranging from single manufacturing components such as sensors to large-scale systems such as smart cities. Given the diverse application domai...

Software is the main driver of added-value in many of the systems that surround us. While its complexity is increasing, so is the diversity of systems driven by software. To meet the challenges emerging from this combination, it is necessary to mobilize increasingly large and heterogeneous multidisciplinary teams, comprising software experts , as w...

AI planning aims to automate the reasoning process that underlies the plan formulation to achieve a particular goal for a particular problem. Research in this field has focused on symbolic methods -which represent knowledge with human readable symbols- to efficiently and systematically produce plans, i.e., sequences of actions to be performed, from...

Today’s Internet of Things (IoT) applications are mostly developed as a bundle of hardware and associated software. Future cross-manufacturer app stores for IoT applications will require that the strong coupling of hardware and software is loosened. In the resulting IoT applications, a quintessential challenge is the effective and efficient deploym...

The Internet of Things promises to bring significant improvements to manufacturing by facilitating the integration of manufacturing devices to collect sensor data and to control production processes. In contrast to previous industrial revolutions , today's change is driven by applied computer science technologies on several layers: Improved interfa...

Research and industry leverage digital twins to monitor and control (cyber-physical) systems in various domains. For their efficient engineering, these twins need to become Systems-of-Systems (SoS), in which digital twins of smaller systems (e.g., a production machine) become parts of digital twins of larger systems (e.g., a factory). Yet, research...

A digital twin improves our use of a cyber-physical system and understanding of its emerging behavior. To this effect, a digital twin is to be developed and configured and potentially also operated by domain experts, who rarely have a professional software engineering background and for whom easy access and support, e.g., in form of low-code platfo...

Mobile robots operate in various environments (e.g. aquatic, aerial, or terrestrial), they come in many diverse shapes and they are increasingly becoming parts of our lives. The successful engineering of mobile robotics systems demands the interdisciplinary collaboration of experts from different domains, such as mechanical and electrical engineeri...

Internet of Things (IoT) applications are exposed to harsh conditions due to factors such as device failure, network problems, or implausible sensor values. We investigate how the inherent encapsulation of component and connector (C&C) architectures can be used to develop and deploy reliable IoT applications. Existing C&C languages for the developm...

Simulationsmodelle der virtuellen Inbetriebnahme eignen sich als Grundlage für digitale Zwillinge von Produktionsanlagen, da sie das Verhalten dieser Anlagen abbilden und häufig bereits aus der Entwicklungsphase zur Verfügung stehen. Der Stand der Technik zeigt allerdings, dass zwischen dem Verhalten der Modelle und dem der realen Systeme noch erhe...

Successfully developing domain-specific languages (DSLs) demands language engineers to consider their organizational context, which is challenging. Action design research (ADR) provides a conceptual framework to address this challenge. Since ADR’s application to the engineering of DSLs has not yet been examined, we investigate applying it to the de...

Simulationsmodelle der virtuellen Inbetriebnahme eignen sich als Grundlage für digitale Zwillinge von Produktionsanlagen. Sie bilden das Verhalten der Anlagen ab und stehen häufig bereits aus der Entwicklungsphase zur Verfügung. Der Stand der Technik zeigt allerdings, dass zwischen dem Verhalten der Modelle und dem der realen Systeme noch erheblich...

Cyber-Physical Systems are increasingly ubiquitous in our society. With complexity and interconnection, we need new concepts, methods, and tools to systematically leverage data obtained from these systems to better understand, control, and optimize their behavior. Digital Twins have emerged as a new paradigm for the virtual representation of comple...

Digital Twins are an emerging concept which is gaining importance in several fields. It refers to a comprehensive software representation of an actual system, which includes structures, properties, conditions, behaviours, history and possible futures of that system through models and data to be continuously synchronized. Digital Twins can be built...

Smart manufacturing demands to process data in domain-specific real-time. Engineering models created for constructing, commissioning, planning, or simulating manufacturing systems can facilitate aggregating and abstracting the wealth of manufacturing data to faster processable data structures for more timely decision making. Current research lacks...

Process discovery from event logs as well as process prediction using process models at runtime are increasingly important aspects to improve the operation of digital twins of complex systems. The integration of process mining functionalities with model-driven digital twin architectures raises the question which models are important for the model-d...

Digital Twins in smart manufacturing must be highly adaptable for different challenges, environments, and system states. In practice, there is a need for enabling the configuration of Digital Twins by domain experts. Low-code approaches seem to be a meaningful solution for configuration purposes but often lack extension options. We propose a model-...

Designing software is an activity in which software developers think and make design decisions that shape the structure and behavior of software products. Designing software is one of the least understood software engineering activities. In a collaborative design setting, various types of distances can lead to challenges and effects that potentiall...

Context: Designing software is an activity in which software developers think and make design decisions that shape the structure and behavior of software products. Designing software is one of the least understood software engineering activities. In a collaborative design setting, various types of distances can lead to challenges and effects that p...

Composing modelling languages and analysis tools still require significant efforts to properly consider syntax and semantics as well as related analyses and syntheses. This composition ideally should be defined on individual language components that can be composed when needed. Only when model-based analysis infrastructures can be composed in accor...

The complexity of cyber–physical systems ( CPSs ) is commonly addressed through complex workflows , involving models in a plethora of different formalisms , each with their own methods, techniques, and tools. Some workflow patterns , combined with particular types of formalisms and operations on models in these formalisms, are used successfully in...

Digital Twins are part of the vision of Industry 4.0 to represent, control, predict, and optimize the behavior of Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPSs). These CPPSs are long-living complex systems deployed to and configured for diverse environments. Due to specific deployment, configuration, wear and tear, or other environmental effects, their...

Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) help practitioners in contributing solutions to challenges of specific domains. The efficient development of user-friendly DSLs suitable for industrial practitioners with little expertise in modelling still is challenging. For such practitioners, who often do not model on a daily basis, there is a need to foster red...

Modeling languages and frameworks have been the key technology for advancing model-driven engineering (MDE) methods and tools. Many industrial and research tools have been realized and are used across many domains. Hence, we think it is the right time to define what should be the future of modeling technologies, especially the requirements for the...

At the core of model-driven development (MDD) of collaborative embedded systems (CESs) are models that realize the different participating stakeholders’ views of the systems. For CESs, these views contain various models to represent requirements, logical functions, collaboration functions, and technical realizations. To enable automated processing,...

Embedded systems are being increasingly used in changing environments where they no longer fulfill their associated stakeholder goals on their own, but rather in interaction with other embedded systems. This transition to networked, collaborative embedded systems is creating new application opportunities that impose numerous challenges for develope...

Digital Shadows are data structures precisely tailored to support decision making in domain-specific real-time that promise tremendous potential to reduce time and cost in manufacturing. They are often engineered ad-hoc, for single specific applications, without considering their aggregation, combination, or reuse. This lack of foundations hampers...

Context Software engineering is a social and collaborative activity. Communicating and sharing knowledge between software developers requires much effort. Hence, the quality of communication plays an important role in influencing project success. To better understand the effect of communication on project success, more in-depth empirical studies in...

To fulfill the contractual requirement of the Sweden Compact agreement, the following funding note has to be added and placed in the Funding section of the original article: Open access funding provided by University of Gothenburg.

Digital twins emerge in many disciplines to support engineering, monitoring, controlling, and optimizing cyber-physical systems, such as airplanes, cars, factories, medical devices, or ships. There is an increasing demand to create digital twins as representation of cyber-physical systems and their related models, data traces, aggregated data, and...

Innovations in Cyber-Physical System (CPS) are driven by functionalities and features. Mechanical Engineering, on the other hand, is mainly concerned with the physical product architecture, i.e., the hierarchical arrangement of physical components and assemblies that forms the product, which is not explicitly linked to these functions. A holistic m...

Digital twins promise tremendous potential to reduce time and cost in the smart manufacturing of Industry 4.0. Engineering and monitoring interactive digital twins currently demands integrating different piecemeal technologies that effectively hinders their application and deployment. Current research on digital twins focuses on specific implementa...

Digital Twins (DTs) of Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPSs) enable the smart automation of production processes, collection of data, and can thus reduce manual efforts for supervising and controlling CPPSs. Realizing DTs is challenging and requires significant efforts for their conception and integration with the represented CPPS. To mitigate...

For the systematic development of logical, message-driven architectures, automating parallel decomposition of software components is important to achieve efficient modular and parallel system development. During development, monolithic components that realize multiple independent concerns need to be decomposed to obtain a higher quality architectur...

Kurzfassung Die Digitalisierung verspricht Unternehmen, die Wandlungsfähigkeit und Produktivität bestehender Fertigungssysteme zu fördern. Durch die Komplexität cyber-physischer Produktionssysteme liegen Produktionsdaten jedoch heterogen, unstrukturiert und isoliert vor. Die für eine konkrete Aufgabe oder Fragestellung benötigten Daten werden durch...

Industry 4.0 integrates cyber-physical systems with the Internet of Things to optimize the complete value-added chain. Successfully applying Industry 4.0 requires the cooperation of various stakeholders from different domains. Domain-specific modeling languages promise to facilitate their involvement through leveraging (domain-specific) models to p...

The 2nd edition of the 2nd International Workshop on Robotics Software Engineering (RoSE) was held at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) in the city of Montreal, Canada, on the 27th of May 2019. The focus of this edition of the workshop was on multi-robot systems and facilitating robot programming. In this report, we rst pr...

Model-driven systems engineering relies on software languages that support different stakeholders. These languages often operate in different technological spaces. Checking consistency, tracing, and change propagation of models developed by different stakeholders, thus demands methods to bridge the gaps between these spaces. Research on the integra...