I love the spirit of research and always try to figure out new approaches. You will find some of my primary research activities on this page. If you are interested in one or more of my research topics, just let me know. My current and past research activities are described below.

Current Research

Due to my move from Volkswagen to THI Investments in May 2019, my research focus has changed. While I had previously done intensive research on (e-)mobility and transport as a service, I am now working on trend analyses and forecasts. The aim is to get automated and intelligent deal recommendations in the future.
I am still active in the field of requirement engineering and cultural change in company. One of my current research areas in this field is the development of a "corporate memory" and its influence on work processes.

Past Research

Before I started working at Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles I was focused mainly on robotics and software engineering. During my Ph.D. studies, I did a lot of research in the area of autonomous vehicles. The main goal of the Ph.D. was to provide a real-time, highly precise localization. I reached a localization of about 10 cm in urban areas by generating a map, run the vehicle localization itself and updating the remote map.
Furthermore, I explore the relationship between weather conditions and their effect on different sensors. Based on an AI mechanism I was able to parameterize the sensors which lead to a more precise localization outcome.

In the following section, you can read more about my Ph.D. thesis. If you are more interested in my publications, just scroll down. The title of my Ph.D. thesis is "A method for mapping and accurate localization with classified environment characteristics of road infrastructure for autonomous vehicles". A long story short:
For self-driving vehicles it is of fundamental importance to know the vehicle’s position and orientation. The resulting challenge is to provide a localization with a high degree of reliability and robustness for mobile systems in changing outdoor settings. These settings are often natural, spacious and complex. My work presents an overall real-time system: The Landmark based Localization (LbL). In contrast to previous localization systems, the LbL uses a uniform, sparse line-based representation of the surrounding environment. As characteristics of the surrounding environment, elements containing in the road infrastructure are used. In detail, road markings and column-shaped objects are taken into account and modeled as geometric primitives. Contrary to previous research, the same sensors are used for mapping as well as the localization of the vehicle.

Since 2016 I worked on mobile online services for vehicles in the context of commercial customers and provided them our fleet management system ConnectFleet. Therefore I focused mainly on the research fields of Mobility and Transportation as a Service as well as e-mobility. Building scalable software and reliability infrastructure components are essential for this field.
Additionally the main part of my research was requirement engineering and cultural change in big companies. Hence I worked together with the Software Engineering Group at Leibniz Universität Hannover on value flow analysis for communication in software projects, called FLOW. Besides, I tried to disrupt the way how feedback and knowledge are handled, by my project VOICE. A Blog posts to this topics can be found here.

Hereinafter, you will find my list of publications, patents and work which I guided.