The research activities of the "Safety-critical and Embedded Systems" (SKES) focus area aim to improve productivity and quality in the development of digital and, where applicable, embedded hardware and software products. Such systems can be found in almost all modern technical systems, as they help the surrounding system to achieve product differentiation, flexibility and increased efficiency by providing new or extended functionality. They have thus become a key technology in a wide range of industries, such as media and communication electronics, mechanical engineering, medical, automotive and aviation technology and robotics. Due to the increasing proportion of value added by embedded systems and their increasing use in highly safety-critical application contexts, quality requirements are growing while product cycles are becoming shorter and cost pressure is 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. In view of the breadth of the problem and the diversity of the fields of application, the provision of such technologies requires the synergetic research performance of various sub-disciplines of Computing Science, Physics and Psychology. The SKES research focus brings together a corresponding consortium that covers the breadth of the topic from modelling and theory of embedded systems and their interaction with the environment to design, validation and verification tools and the safety-critical application domains mentioned above.

The research work on safety-critical systems is among the international leaders, which is impressively demonstrated by the acquisition of corresponding joint projects from the DFG (SFB/TR 14 AVACS, DFG GRK 1765 SCARE) and the MWK (research centre CSE, doctoral programme "Safe Automation of Maritime Systems"), a central role in the transatlantic coordination of relevant research activities (CPS Summit) and the organisation of corresponding leading conferences (CPS Week 2014 in Berlin) as well as the best-attended PhD schools in the field in Europe (AVACS Spring School 2010, AVACS Autumn School 2015, both in Oldenburg).