Research Professors

The further development of wireless communication systems in recent years has made technologies available that can sustainably improve vehicle safety and traffic efficiency through their use. While the KOALA project in the first phase of the DFG's Priority Programme 1835 mainly aimed at reducing the latency generated by the communication system as well as at latency modelling, the follow-up project KOALA2 addresses the use of this low-latency communication for vehicle automation in a holistic approach. Design patterns for communication are being developed for scenario-based manoeuvre coordination between vehicles in cooperative use cases (such as lane changing, driving in a pack/platooning and emergency steering). For this purpose, the current broadcast-based information dissemination will be extended to include communication in groups of vehicles that exclusively comprise the actors of the respective manoeuvre. The developed procedures will be implemented prototypically and validated experimentally. The project sustainably improves cooperative manoeuvre and trajectory planning as key technologies for safety-relevant use cases in cooperative automated driving.

Accidental or burning hybrid and electric vehicles receive special attention in the media landscape. This leads to uncertainty among prospective buyers and consequently to a loss of confidence in the technology. Vehicle accidents or fires are caused, among other things, by system malfunctions. Especially the large amount of complex software inevitably leads to errors in the system, which may represent a security gap and thus lead to vulnerabilities that malicious attackers can exploit to manipulate the software. On the one hand, this impairs the functionality of an ECU, such as the battery management system, and on the other hand, the ECU can be used as a basis for further attacks. The consequences are not only damage to the image of electromobility and recall actions, but also potential damage to people and the environment. The scenarios mentioned are currently fuelled by insufficient penetration testing and a lack of standards, norms and laws for vehicle security.
The central goals of the Holistic Automotive Testing of Security, Safety, and Storage (HATS3) project are to set up a test bench for realistic security tests on vehicles while stationary and on the move, and to enable security-relevant experiments to be carried out on hybrid and electric vehicles. In addition, a method for increasing the degree of automation in the area of automotive penetration testing is to be developed in order to be able to standardise tests on the one hand and on the other hand to be able to carry them out more cost-effectively and at the same time earlier, more often and more extensively. Another goal is the targeted development of knowledge in the field of IT forensics for warranty and insurance cases of hybrid and electric vehicles.

The HATS3 project is headed by Professor Hans-Joachim Hof. Professor Hof heads the "Security in Mobility" research group at the CARISSMA Institute of Electric, Connected, and Secure Mobility. The research group regularly offers exciting theses. If you are interested, please contact Professor Hof (hof@thi.de).

The importance of software in vehicles has been increasing for years. While there are many methods to ensure safety in the development of software for vehicles, security was not considered with the same intensity until recently, even though hackers managed to remotely take over and control a vehicle (Jeep Cherokee) as early as 2015. At the end of 2021, a standard was adopted in the form of ISO 21434, which prescribes a security development lifecycle for vehicles.
In the project Model-based Assurance of Security and Safety for Environment-based Vehicle Functions (MASSiF), models have been developed since 2019 to automatically generate security test cases for software in vehicles. The test system generates attacks automatically based on a database of attack modules as well as on an existing system model and the characteristics of the attacker. A special focus of the project is the interaction of functional safety and information security in the development of vehicles.

The security part of the MASSiF project is led by Professor Hans-Joachim Hof. Professor Hof heads the "Security in Mobility" research group at the CARISSMA Institute of Electric, Connected, and Secure Mobility. The research group regularly offers exciting theses. If you are interested, please contact Professor Hof (hof@thi.de).

Developing an innovative battery system and thus helping to shape the mobility of tomorrow - this is the task that researchers at THI are tackling together with 16 partners in the EU research project "MARBEL" (Manufacturing and Assembly of Modular and Reusable EV Battery for Environment-Friendly and Lightweight Mobility). The project aims to develop an innovative and environmentally friendly lightweight battery system with increased energy density and shorter charging time. A special focus is on protecting the battery systems of the future from attacks by hackers. The research group led by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Hans-Joachim Hof, is contributing to the definition of the system's IT security requirements and the development of the battery management system's connection to a cloud, with a focus on cyber security.  Professor Hof: "Battery systems of the future represent an attractive target for hackers. In MARBLE, my research group is developing protection methods against attacks in future mobility scenarios."

Professor Hof heads the "Security in Mobility" research group at the CARISSMA Institute of Electric, Connected, and Secure Mobility. The research group regularly offers exciting theses. If you are interested, please contact Professor Hof (hof@thi.de).

The high and increasing degree of networking of intelligent vehicles with each other and with their environment within the framework of an Automotive Cyber System (ACS) enables novel applications, but is also accompanied by new threats from attackers. Secure networking and secure access to all relevant system components or data are consequently becoming the decisive factors for the entire vehicle infrastructure and the confidence of vehicle occupants. It can be assumed that stakeholders or even the intelligent vehicles themselves will increasingly access components, integrated software, data and functions throughout the entire vehicle lifecycle. Consequently, a growing number of stakeholders will need access to a vehicle, its infrastructure, its functions or its data. Since an ACS consists of vehicles from different manufacturers, infrastructure facilities and mobility services from different providers, an ACS is inherently very heterogeneous. What is needed, therefore, is a cooperative and holistic approach to IT security, which has been lacking in the vision of "fully autonomous driving".
The research project TRADE (TRustworthy Autonomous Driving by DEcentralised Authen-tication and Authorisation) therefore aims to develop a secure, cooperative and scalable security solution. A decentralised identity management solution is to realise a "global" standardised identity layer for an automotive cyber system. The solution takes into account the requirements of all stakeholders as well as the automotive lifecycle. The decisive management of access to the automotive cyber system is to be imposed on the respective "owner" in the corresponding partial life cycle.
By focusing on the creation of a cooperative identity management solution that includes decentralised authentication and authorisation mechanisms, the basis for an overarching security concept for ACS is created. In the context of TRADE, the functionality and resilience of the envisaged solution is demonstrated using the example of the use case "automotive plagiarism protection" based on hardware from the project partner ETO.    

Video about the project on the website of the project partner ETO (Youtube-Link)

The security part of the TRADE project is led by Professor Hans-Joachim Hof. Professor Hof heads the research group "Security in Mobility" at the CARISSMA Institute of Electric, Connected, and Secure Mobility. The research group regularly offers exciting theses. If you are interested, please contact Professor Hof (hof@thi.de).

The Human-Computer Interaction Group (HCIG) at THI is an interdisciplinary research group consisting of computer scientists, usability/UX researchers, human factors experts and psychologists, which is engaged in hypothesis-driven experimental research in the field of Human-Computer Interaction with a special focus on usability research for intelligent user interfaces and mobility of the future. current publicly and industry-funded research projects of the group address research questions in the field of automated vehicles/shuttle buses with extension into the third dimension (urban air mobility, drones). The team's spectrum covers the entire range of pervasive computing applications and ubiquitous systems, e.g. multimodal interaction, adaptive and explainable (AI) systems, estimation of vital state from psychophysiological measurements, technology trust/acceptance, intention recognition, situation awareness, in-vehicle data collection: Recently, the HCIG team has been increasingly working on augmented, mixed and virtual reality (AR/VR/MR) applications to evaluate novel and efficient interaction metaphors or to investigate usability/UX of interfaces. In addition, we have a strong interest (and fun) in conducting field experiments and (driving) simulator studies (including Wizard-of-Oz).

Research agenda: "Developing future interaction concepts and intelligent user interfaces that incorporate cognitive elements to reflect the uniqueness of the user".

The group is led by Prof. Dr. Andreas Riener and was founded in January 2016.

Research agenda: "Development of future interaction concepts and intelligent user interfaces that include cognitive elements to reflect the uniqueness of the user".

The group is led by Prof. Dr. Andreas Riener and was founded in January 2016.

Link: https://hcig.thi.de/

The Computer Vision for Intelligent Mobility Systems research group is concerned with deep learning methods for analysing and generating image data. Data from different imaging sensors in two- and three-dimensional space are processed. The aim of the research group is to develop super-human perception for automated vehicles, aircraft, rail vehicles and other means of transport, and to analyse image data from infrastructure sensors for traffic monitoring. To achieve this goal, the group is researching novel deep learning architectures and their application to mobility systems. An important component of this is the reliable recognition of objects as well as the complete semantic segmentation of the environment even under difficult conditions such as heavy rain or snowfall. For this purpose, several sensor modalities are usually used, which can be merged by means of deep fusion. In order to generate the large amount of training data, the research group continues to work on the simulation of image data and how these can be transformed using Transfer Learning or Generative Adversarial Networks so that they appear like real data.

In addition to the efforts in the field of mobility, the research group headed by Prof. Dr. Torsten Schön is committed to the use of computer vision for improved environmental protection and more sustainability.