The research activities of the “Safety-Critical and Embedded Systems” (SKES) research group are aimed at improving productivity and quality in the development of digital and, where applicable, embedded hardware and software products. Such systems are found in almost all modern technical systems, as they help the surrounding system to achieve product differentiation, greater flexibility and increased efficiency by providing new or enhanced functionality. They have thus become a key technology across a wide range of industrial sectors, such as media and communications electronics, mechanical engineering, medical, automotive and aerospace engineering, and robotics. Due to the increasing share of value added by embedded systems and their growing use in highly safety-critical application contexts, quality requirements are rising whilst product cycles are simultaneously shortening and cost pressures are increasing. This results, on the one hand, in the need for more efficient product development and validation techniques than are currently available, and, on the other hand, in a need for case-specific developments of software or hardware-software systems for new fields of application. Given the breadth of the issue and the diversity of application fields, the development of such technologies requires synergistic research efforts across a wide range of sub-disciplines within Computing Science, as well as physics and psychology. The SKES research focus brings together a consortium that covers the full scope of the subject, ranging from modelling and the theory of embedded systems and their interaction with the environment, through design, validation and verification tools, to the safety-critical application domains mentioned above.

The research into safety-critical systems ranks amongst the very best internationally, as impressively demonstrated by the successful acquisition of relevant joint projects from the DFG (SFB/TR 14 AVACS, DFG RTG 1765 SCARE) and the MWK (CSE Research Centre, doctoral programme ‘Safe Automation of Maritime Systems’), a central role in the transatlantic coordination of relevant research activities (CPS Summit) and the organisation of leading conferences (CPS Week 2014 in Berlin), and in organising the most well-attended PhD schools in this field in Europe (AVACS Spring School 2010, AVACS Autumn School 2015, both held in Oldenburg).