paluno – The Ruhr Institute for Software Technology

Research Areas

An overview of paluno’s key research areas can be found at: www.paluno.uni-due.de/en.

Examples of current research include:

• Runtime-Adaption of Future Internet Applications: Future software-intensive systems must adapt during run-time in order to react to unforeseen changes. As part of European and German research projects paluno develops innovative adaptation techniques for software-intensive systems and techniques to dynamically predict changes (“predictive monitoring”).
• Security, Safety and Trust: Consideration of the quality requirements on software systems, such as security, safety, privacy, trust and compliance, during early development phases is essential for successful software development. Research activities in this area focus on requirements interaction management, generating architecture alternatives from quality requirements, and the definition and assessment of threat analyses.
• Cooperative System Design: A lack of understanding of business and technology is one of the main reasons for the failure of software projects. The Interaction Room is an approach developed by paluno to focus communication between all stakeholders on the aspects of a project that are truly important and critical to its success. Intuitive visualization methods ensure that uncertainties and risks can be identified and resolved early on. An additional focus in terms of the information systems is on their socio-technical design with regard to future use. Here the demands of the relevant domain-specific business processes as well as the needs and skills of the users are taken into account.
• Pervasive Computing: The research focus within this area is on the development of system software and processes which enable automatic detection of user context (context awareness) and activities (activity recognition) by smartphones. These processes are based on analysis of sensor data and signal processing and are tested in areas such as ambient assisted living and smart cities.
• Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) have the ability to access and change properties of the real world using sensors and actuators. Cyber-physical systems are connected with each other through global networks, such as the Internet. Together with the content and the services provided by the Internet, they form a network of systems which interact according to the situation to perform valuable and complex services. paluno is developing concepts and techniques to support the systematic development and operation of cyber-physical systems.