Joint Research Group on Aeronautical Informatics
The Aeronautical Informatics group is a joint research group of the TU Clausthal Institute for Informatics and the DLR Institute of Flight Systems. It was founded and is led by Professor Umut Durak.
Aircraft are becoming software-defined, and an increasing share of software-defined aircraft functions will be learned rather than specified. Established assurance practice assumes that requirements can be written down and traced to code. That assumption does not hold for learning-enabled functions, and it holds less as those functions gain autonomy. Our work addresses how such systems can be assured.
Our topics include learning assurance for airborne applications, safety and security of AI-based aeronautical systems, digital twins as a means of generating assurance evidence, and agile approaches to certification. We are beginning to extend this work to agentic AI, where future systems will act on goals rather than on fixed procedures, and where the question of what constitutes adequate evidence is still open.
The group works closely with the DLR Institute of Flight Systems, where the platform side of the software-defined aircraft is developed, including open instruction set hardware, portable execution formats and cloud-native onboard architectures.
Our work is carried out in funded projects with industry and research partners. In MuStHaF, with Airbus, DLR and TU Braunschweig, we developed a digital functional test platform for multifunctional control surfaces. In QSMA, with emmtrix Technologies and AbsInt, we worked on tool qualification for avionics development. Earlier work in CPS4EU and in the SMART4ALL Embedded DevOps experiment addressed cyber-physical systems engineering and DevOps practices for airborne software.
The group is based at the AeroLab in Clausthal-Zellerfeld and works together with the DLR Institute of Flight Systems in Braunschweig. We supervise doctoral, master and bachelor work in all of these areas and welcome students who want to work where computer science and aeronautics meet.
If you are interested, contact us by e-mail or phone (+49 5323 72-7129). You can also find us at the AeroLab, Albrecht-von-Groddeck-Str. 7, top floor.