The newly established “Klaus Tschira Graduate School on the Architecture of Highly Reliable Software Systems” at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern is offering a number of PhD scholarships for research in the area of dependable systems.

Klaus Tschira, co-founder of SAP AG, one of the world’s largest software companies, is supporting research in applied IT through the Klaus Tschira Foundation (KTS). One of the key goals of the foundation is to help develop (software) systems that can be used in an intuitive manner, that are robust and dependable, and that automatically adapt to both the user and the operational context. As part of this overall agenda, the KTS has entered into an agreement with the Technical University of Kaiserslautern in order to establish the “Klaus Tschira Graduate School on the Architecture of Highly Reliable Software Systems”.
The graduate school is associated with the KTS-endowed chair “Dependable Systems” (Prof. Dr.-Ing. Andreas Reuter).

The research agenda of the graduate school comprises the following topics:
- Dependability at different levels of granularity (threads, components, workflows)
- Compositional principles supporting dependability
- A conceptual framework for dealing with exceptions at multiple levels
- Comprehensive use of invariants maintaining system correctness and for containing side effects of errors.
- Dynamical wrappers (aka spheres of control) as parts of a run-time monitoring mechanism supporting reliability.
- Developing methods for anticipating failures before they actually occur.
- Methodological frameworks for employing the notions of invariants, monitoring, and simulation throughout the development process.
- Measures of dependability
- Certification of complex systems

The graduate school is part of the Department of Computer Science at Technical University of Kaiserslautern (www.informatik.uni-kl.de).
The research programs mentioned above will be organized in collaboration with other research groups in the department – depending on the specific subject. In addition, there is the potential of joint research activities with well-established research organizations in the area, such as: Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE), the German AI Research Center (DFKI), the two Max-Planck Institutes for Computer Science and for Software Systems, and the European Media Laboratory. Collaboration and exchange with industry will be an integral part of each project.