Projects Outside Space Area

For the period up to 1996 projects, studies and other activities were executed by Dr. Rainer Gerlich as an employer of EADS Astrium (former Dornier GmbH).

2003-: Harmonised Database Processing Approach

Automated generation of code to establish the database, to access the data and to manage the access rights, to present the data by a GUI from a single source by a user-defined format. First version does support SQL and Java.

2002-: User Interfaces

Automated generation of graphical user interfaces from existing source code or XML specifications. Modelling of GUIs for infotainment systems.

2002-: OCS

Derivation of algorithms for determiniation of 3D-position at high precision (sub-mm) by one video camera only in the context of medical applications. Proof of concept, verification approach which guarantees the required accuracy, implementation on Linux and MS-Windows (2000, XP). Scalable system, n cameras may be combined either towards higher accuracy or fault tolerance.

2000-2003: AutoPilot

A "Virtual User" for Macintosh platform (Mac OS 8.1+, 9 and X) for recording and playback of user actions, also covering automated testing and verification of GUIs. Operation via a C-like scripting environment

1997-2001: CRISYS

CRISYS (ESPRIT Project EP 25514) is a research project dealing with (safety) critical distributed systems in application areas like aerospace, nuclear technology, petro-chemistry or automation. The project was started in November 1997 and lasted for 3 years. Prime contractor was Schneider Electric in Grenoble. Aerospatiale Airbus (Toulouse), Elf, Siemens Electrocom, CEA, Verilog, Verimag, GMD, University of Grenoble and BSSE were team members.

The role of BSSE wass to provide technology and tools for a synthesis of the asynchronous and synchronous approach based on BSSE work and experience in the area of formal validation.

1997-1998: CADIS

The software monitors the hardware and reconfigures itself in case of a hardware fault or an overload. Acquisition and distribution of data is performed by means of a transparent I/O layer which handles a variety of interfaces like LAN, ISDN, files and screens, RS232 and redundancy of communication lines.

1997: OPAL

OPAL (OLDI Protocol Evaluation, OLDI=On-Line Data Interchange Standard) was a study executed for Eurocontrol Experimental Center in Bretigny (F) to evaluate the correctness and to identify potential conflicts for the OLDI protocol.

The data communication between air traffic control centers, the controllers and the computers was modeled and analysed with the EaSySim II environment. Due to the performance modelling capabilities of EaSySim II a number of potentail conflicts could be identified which arise typically for a distributed system. Moreover, the generic modelling capabilities of EaSySim II allowed to succeed with verification of behaviour for a scenario of more than one hundred flight plan entries not encountering state explosion which is usually a problem for such a large scenario.

1994-1995: SOFTPAR

SOFTPAR was an ESPRIT III project executed together with Sema-Group (F) as prime contractor, GMD (D), Parsytec (D) and EDP (P) as further subcontractors. It aims to provide a software factory for parallel and distributed high-performance applications. Subcontract manager at Dornier was Mr. Gerlich.

Main contributions by Mr. Rainer Gerlich were:

• definition of a concept for easy hardware-software partitioning (CORBA compatible) on the HPC++ platform (HPC++ = High Performance C++ for parallel applications),
• definition of a hard-real-time approach for client-server applications,
• introduction of above concepts into HOOD4,
• definition and implementation of a Performance Prediction Tool, which allows to predict the performance of parallel and distributed applications for different hardware-software configurations.