[MUSIC] My name is Manfred Broy. I was for a long time a professor for software and systems engineering at the faculty of informatics at the Technical University of Munich. At that time I was basically doing research on systems engineering around the number of topics, which are also very interesting for of your avionic applications. Today I'm the President of the Center of Digitization here in Bavaria. And our goal is to make sure that these digital technologies, which are very rapidly developing, will be used in a number of applications. We organize our work in a number of so-called theme platforms. One theme platform there is a platform on mobility. This platform looks at all different kinds of mobility and tries to understand how digital technology can support questions of mobility. And here we are close to a field which is also part of our mobility platform, but is a field on its own, the application of digital technology in the field of avionics. In principle, the step into a systems engineering in avionics was done during the Second World War for a number of reasons. One of the reasons was the upcoming radar technology, which really changed a lot the way military aircraft were doing their duties and tasks in the Second World War. After that, in the 60s and 70s, we had development of jet fighters, and jet fighters needed a lot of support according to digital technologies. They use what we call embedded systems which in the 60s were also filled up with a lot of software. And therefore it's interesting to study how the field of avionics developed under this technology pressure which came from the digital technology. One of the first very interesting points was the introduction of fly-by-wire. Fly-by-wire means that the pilot no longer operates his aircraft directly but operates his aircraft by giving input to a computer. Where the input is done also by a joysticks so that the pilot may have the idea that he directly controls the aircraft. But in the end he only controls the input to a computer and the computer activates activators which in the end make sure that the aircraft operates the way the pilot wants it. This was interesting in particular for aircraft fighters like the Eurofighter. Who is an aircraft that cannot be operated manually without the help of a computer according to its particular [COUGH] styles of operating. Later this idea was taken over also for civil aircrafts. And as a first large aircraft producer, Airbus decided to introduce fly-by-wire into its aircrafts. The result was that the fact that in the days before there were three persons in a cockpit, two pilots in an engineer, ended up with a situation where there were only two persons needed, two pilots. And the engineer could be replaced by the technology according to fly-by-wire. Nowadays aircrafts are really flying computers and the pilots are supported not only by fly-by-wire techniques, but by a lot of other systems, which are based on digital technology. What is in particular interesting is the very specific man machine interaction that is introduced in aircrafts today, the pilots are supported in many respects. One interesting example is that nowadays is the machine has processes which allow to observe whether there is a cognitive overload for the pilot. And make sure that the pilot gets exactly the information that is needed in particular in critical situations. And what is done in an aircraft is a very interesting example also for other areas of application of man-machine interfaces. But it's not only the pilots, it's also everything around an aircraft or inside an aircraft which is supported a lot by a digital technology. Be it the infotainment system of the passengers, be it the service systems around the aircraft, what's going on on the ground. And also how a passenger today books his or her flights. How a passenger does the check-in and how a passenger is informed at the airport about changes is very much based on digital technologies. So we can see, nowadays there is a kind of a synthesis between digital technology and aircraft technology leading into a very specific field, which is really demanding a lot of systems engineering. But this is not the end of the story, currently we see that a lot of other things are coming. For instance, one thing which we can observe data. Aircraft collect a lot of data and in the old days this data was not really analyzed. Nowadays we have machines and computers which are powerful enough to analyze all these datasets that are recorded by the aircraft. And use the results of the analysis of the datasets to bring in additional support. Interesting example would be predictive maintenance which allows us to recognize that there might be a problem with a certain part of an aircraft even before the problem is explicitly there and invisible. Another good example is artificial intelligence which allows to support, first of all, the man-machine interface but also to take over a number of tasks quite independently. So we could even imagine that in the future we will have aircrafts which fly completely on their own, autonomous. Completely controlled by their digital control systems and that no pilots are no longer necessary. Perhaps there will be a one person in the cockpit which does some supervision of what's going on. But it's no longer really taking part of the, really, process of lying. Another example is blockchain. Blockchain is a technology which allows to record datain in a distributed manner such that the recorded data cannot be changed later. This is interesting for logistic purposes, but it's also interesting for safety purposes, so we can record important parts of that. Another example would be the platform companies. And I believe that aircraft carriers and also aircraft producers are on their way to become platform companies which are based on software platforms for the different services they offer. So what we observe is a kind of a synthesis of different disciplines. Disciplines of informatics and of digital disciplines with disciplines classical engineering of aircrafts. They will come together, they are already today about to form a unique discipline of systems engineering, and this will change the world. In particular, it will change the way we produce aircrafts, we operate aircrafts and we use the aircrafts.
