462/11 23 November 2011 Research

Oldenburg. A major success for Oldenburg's Computing Science department: the German
Research Foundation (DFG) today decided to fund the Collaborative Research Centre (Transregio) "Automatic
Verification and Analysis of Complex Systems" (AVACS), which was established eight years ago
, for a further four
years. It is providing 10 million euros for this purpose. The spokesperson
for the Collaborative Research Centre is the Oldenburg university professor for
Safety-Critical Embedded Systems, Prof. Dr Werner Damm. In addition to
the Oldenburg computer scientists Prof Dr M. Fränzle, Prof Dr
Ernst-Ruediger Olderog and Prof Dr Oliver Theel,
scientists from the universities in Freiburg and Saarbrücken and
from the Max Planck Institute for Computing Science in Saarbrücken are also involved.
The Academy of
Sciences of the Czech Republic is also a partner in the research work.

"With its decision, the DFG impressively confirms the quality of the
research that the scientists have carried out over the
last eight years. However, it also
underlines the particular relevance of this work for the future of
transport and the mobility of our society," emphasised
University President Prof. Dr Babette Simon.

Since January 2004, AVACS scientists have been working on developing
techniques for the mathematically exact verification and analysis of
safety-critical embedded systems. In addition to
excellent technical results, the collaboration
between experts from different sub-disciplines is particularly crucial to the
success of AVACS, emphasised Damm. The extension of the funding will help
to prove the safety of traffic technology applications in
cars, aeroplanes and trains using mathematical methods.
"The vision of AVACS is that the safety properties of
highly networked systems can also be checked automatically at the touch of a button
- both at the modelling level and in
real applications in traffic," said Damm.

Info: www.avacs.org
Contact:
Prof Dr Werner Damm,
Email: