University Cooperations

The Chair for Industrial Information Management (formerly the Audi Foundation Chair for Supply Net Order Management) is part of the LogistikCampus at TU Dortmund University, bundling and developing expertise in technical logistics and information logistics in cooperation with the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics IML and the Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering ISST.

The Chair for Industrial Information Management researches innovative concepts, processes, architectures, and solutions for business and logistics networks. The work is defined by interdisciplinary access to the research object at the interface of engineering sciences, business administration, and computer sciences. To this end, the chair cooperates with numerous national and international science and industry partners.

The chair is held by Prof. Boris Otto, who is also the executive director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering ISST. Otto’s research focuses on the fields of industrial information management, business and logistics networks, and methods for the design of digital business solutions.

Prof. Jakob Rehof holds the Chair XIV for Software Engineering at TU Dortmund. As holder of the chair, Rehof with his group (SEAL) conducts research in the area of software engineering with algorithms and logic. The development of new algorithms is used to automate the mathematical logic and analysis of software systems in order to further industrialize the creation of high-quality software. Recently the research conducted by Rehof’s group has been focusing in particular on composition synthesis using combinative logic, in which product lines are automatically compiled by software applications from repositories of components. Applications in factory planning, the synthesis of simulation models, and other areas are also being researched.

Since 2006, Prof. Jakob Rehof has held the Chair for Software Engineering he founded at TU Dortmund University. Born in Denmark in 1960, he studied Latin, Greek, philosophy, information science and mathematics, and earned a doctorate in information science at the University of Copenhagen. Rehof was a visiting researcher at Stanford University in 1997 and, from 1998 to 2006, was employed as a researcher at Microsoft Research Labs in Redmond, USA where he among other things co-authored 16 patents. In addition, he was a member of the institute management of Fraunhofer ISST from 2006 to 2021.

Prof. Jan Cirullies holds the Professorship for Business Administration (notably Supply Chain Management and Digital Logistics) in the Economics department at the Dortmund University of Applied Sciences. His research area encompasses data procurement, integration, and analysis for the strategic design of logistics networks, logistics planning, and operational controlling. Here the focus is on researching novel logistics concepts, such as supply-chain-wide collaboration approaches or decentralized decision-making, in conjunction with novel digital tech-nologies such as International Data Spaces, ontologies, or AI-based analyses. The combination of applied teaching and research at the University of Applied Sciences perfectly complements the practical research and development of digital technologies at Fraunhofer ISST.

At Fraunhofer ISST, Prof. Cirullies as Senior Scientist is researching the develop-ment of a digital twin for production and logistics in the Logistics department. He previously worked at Fraunhofer for many years, most recently as Head of the Logistics department at Fraunhofer ISST, before following the call to FH Dortmund in 2020.

At the University of Health Sciences in Bochum (hsg Bochum), Prof. Wolfgang Deiters in the Department of Community Health with his Professorship for User-Oriented Health Technologies researches the potential and challenges of technical decision support systems and digital health services for the support of health professionals, citizens, patients, and their family members in designing healthcare services. This applies for prevention as well as supporting care and rehabilitation processes.

Research efforts center on the question of how digitization can be used to shape efficient and humane healthcare. His research focal points include the areas of digitization strategies in healthcare, user-oriented digital health services for prevention, therapy, and care, mobile health services, socio-technical and resource-oriented everyday support systems for a long and healthy life, digitally assisted healthcare structures, and the development of structures for digital health literacy.

As part of the inter-professional health center, he and his colleagues pursue the goal of designing and testing interdisciplinary healthcare services and making these concepts available to various target groups (patients, family members, health professionals, the housing industry, municipalities, etc.) in an advisory capacity.

Prior to his work at hsg Bochum, Prof. Wolfgang Deiters was part of the Fraunhofer ISST management team for many years. Today he primarily assists the Healthcare business unit as Senior Scientist and consultant. This cooperation results in numerous joint project activities.

Prof. Falk Howar works in the Faculty of Information Science at TU Dortmund University on the analysis and validation of autonomous and safety-critical software systems. He is particularly interested in the use of learning and formal methods to analyze the behavior of such systems. These methods have been implemented by him in various software tools, which have among other things been used to uncover an error in the implementation of the TCP protocol in the widespread Linux kernel.

After studying information science and earning a doctorate at TU Dortmund, Falk Howar spent time in the USA at Carnegie Mellon University (Silicon Valley) and the NASA Ames Research Center, where he developed methods for testing an autonomous air traffic control system. Subsequently he was part of the executive at the Institute for Applied Software Systems Engineering at TU Clausthal. There he researched the validation of autonomous driving functions with automobile industry partners. Since September of 2017, Falk Howar is Professor for Software Engineer-ing at TU Dortmund and also associated with Fraunhofer ISST in research projects. He has been coordinating research in the field of software engineering at Fraunho-fer ISST since the beginning of 2020 in the domains of healthcare, logistics, and the data economy.

Prof. Jan Jürjens is Director Research Projects at Fraunhofer ISST and Head of the Institute for Software Technology IST at the University of Koblenz. Fraunhofer ISST and the Institute for Software Technology entered into a strategic cooperation agreement in 2017. A number of projects have already been carried out within this framework (such as the EU projects VisiOn, Qu4lity, TRUSTS, and DataPorts, the BMWi project IIP Ecosphere and the BMBF project XAPS).

The institute researches model-based methods and tools for software development in critical systems: Analyses of business process and software models for quality attributes such as IT security, transparency, and compliance as well as static and runtime-based software verification are developed in the area of software quality. The recording and analysis of non-functional requirements is examined in the area of managing large software projects. Continuing to meet existing requirements in the course of software evolution is investigated for the topic of software maintainability. Here the methods and tools are among other things applied to software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud-oriented software architectures, and to distributed data architectures such as International Data Spaces where best practice solutions for secure development do not exist yet.

In teaching, the focus is on software engineering in general and on model-based software development and its specialization for the development of secure software.

Prof. Jan Jürjens primarily coordinates the publicly funded projects at Fraunhofer ISST and the institute’s scientific publications. He is also a member of the program management committee of the International Data Spaces initiative.

Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Sven Meister is researching at the Chair of Health Informatics how digitalization is changing work in the healthcare sector. The research is conducted in the three areas of "Human-Technology Interaction", "Health Infrastructures" and "Artificial Intelligence". The research is designed to be interdisciplinary and to bring together medicine, nursing, psychology and technology. To this end, the chair cooperates with the Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering ISST in Dortmund.

Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Sven Meister has been working at Fraunhofer ISST since 2006, most recently as head of the Healthcare department. In his new role, he sees himself as a mediator between the end users of digitization and the technologists.

Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Meister will continue to be associated with the Fraunhofer ISST in the business area "Healthcare" and will support the team as a senior scientist and consultant with his many years of experience.

Prof. Christian Schwede holds the professorship for Big Data Analytics at the Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences. He developed and manages a new, innovative study concept for the new Campus Gütersloh with the Data Science project-based research master, which in particular prepares students for working in applied research.

His research area is the digitization of logistics processes. Here he focuses on applications for the processing of real-time data from operating processes for use in decision-support systems based on digital twins. With the vision of an agent-based economy, Christian Schwede researches the transformation of today’s value creation processes based on autonomous, intelligent agents to manage orders and resources. On the one hand, this encompasses intralogistics scenarios for decentralized, highly flexible production, in which the flow of materials is dominated by driverless transport systems and the flow of information originates from the order as an intelligent instance. On the other hand, he also conducts research on value creation between companies, in which intelligent agents negotiate service agreements as well as the provision of data in supply networks.

As a member of the Center for Applied Data Science (CfADS – https://www.fh-bielefeld.de/ium/cfads) in Gütersloh, Prof. Schwede also pursues the goal of applying data science within the companies in the region.

Prof. Sweden works in the Logistics business unit at Fraunhofer ISST, where he assists the team as Senior Scientist and consultant with his many years of experience and knowledge.

At TU Braunschweig, the junior professorship for Business Informatics, which established in April 2023, researches in particular Data-Driven Enterprise how data can be used in society and industry to create value. It is dedicated to exciting topics such as data ecosystems, data-based business models and data sovereignty.

The junior professorship focuses on data ecosystems, which form socio-technical networks in which data is exchanged between different actors. Data exchange generates both individual and collective benefits for the participating companies. The junior professorship explores how the increasing availability of industrial data brings new challenges and opportunities for the design and management of data ecosystems.