Open Access

The paper at hand describes how a regional university of applied sciences tried to internationalize its learning and teaching environment. It describes the challenges encountered, the managerial approach taken, illustrates the implemented initiatives, and how effective they turned out. The results might be relevant to faculty staff in managerial positions at regional universities all over the world that face the challenge to internationalize their teaching and learning environment for the benefit of their domestic students.

Assuming that future connected cars with automated driving functions will require even more computing power and communication bandwidth, the current network infrastructure as well as the existing individualized control units are not a profitable option for such vehicles. In addition, changing user expectations demand flexible architectural patterns and upgradeability of software components without the need to visit the workshop. However, the current statically developed and configured ECU architecture does not offer any practicable possibilities for this. For these reasons, the research for a new dynamic and flexible architecture is necessary. This new type of system architecture is expected to meet future requirements in terms of space, cost, performance, energy efficiency and number of required computing units in the vehicle, which will arise as a result of the implementation/inclusion of new automated driving functionalities, and due to the changes in user expectations. Solutions to this issue can be found in the field of enterprise IT (cluster computing), in which technologies such as Ethernet, container-based virtualization and flexible software architectures have proven themselves to be very efficient for years. Relevant infrastructures, for example from cloud computing providers, have commonly been used in high-performance or high-availability applications. Thus, in the research project A 3F has been investigated which of these concepts and methods can be applied to modern vehicle system architectures. One of the main goals is to assess the synergy potential of the two sectors, information technology and automotive industry, which to date have very different orientations. However, this synergy is expected to grow strongly in the course of the developments mentioned above. In the following pages, the necessary changes related to hardware and software will be discussed briefly und will be compared to concepts and possible solutions from the IT world.

Intelligent driver assistance systems and new infotainment innovations cause a rapidly growing demand of computing power. To satisfy that demand, the quantity of electronic control units in cars has increased dramatically. OEMs tackle that trend by consolidating software on powerful multicore hardware platforms. However, current software solutions are mostly static and designed to run on limited platforms. As promising operating system for automotive, Linux comes into consideration, which seems to scale better than already existing solutions. To ease the migration process of older software parts and guarantee freedom from interference according to ISO26262 between single software partitions, embedded hypervisors can achieve that requirements. Up to now, automotive systems are not developed to run within virtualized environments. Within this paper, we present an approach to map communication channels of virtual automotive ECUs and connect them with their already existing CAN interfaces. For our analysis, we use the Xen hypervisor. The focus for interaction between virtual machines is to use SocketCAN and given paravirtualized Ethernet drivers. Our goal is a non-intrusive software integration methodology. We keep the source code within software partitions as unmodified as possible. To benchmark our studies, we evaluate our implementation on the Intel i7 and the.

Smart Grid, Smart Metering, Electromobility and the regulation of the power network are keywords of the transition in energy policies. In the future, the power grid will be smart. Due to this the OTH Regensburg does research in this area based on different projects. This paper presents a data collection, analyzing and monitoring software for a reference Smart Grid. We discuss two possible architectures for collecting data from energy analyzers. The performance is analyzed with respect to real-time monitoring, analyzing load peaks and automated regulation of the power grid.