Electrical Engineering and Information Technology

Professor Lutz Eckstein © IKA

Lecture by Professor Lutz Eckstein, Head of the Institute for Automotive Engineering at RWTH Aachen University and President of the VDI, on Wednesday, 22 October 2025, from 5:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. Admission is free. The lecture/discussion will take place via Zoom and will be available as a video recording afterwards.

The automotive industry is facing major challenges. As well as electrification and automated driving, these mainly relate to the underlying hardware and software architecture that defines the functionality of modern motor vehicles. As with smartphones, it is now possible to update the infotainment system with apps and updates. However, established vehicle manufacturers are reluctant to implement a service-oriented software architecture and provide frequent updates and upgrades for safety-related functions.
Emerging competition in the field of automated driving, however, makes this necessary. From both a social and customer perspective, it would be unacceptable to respond to critical situations or even accidents only after months with a software update. While new vehicle manufacturers with an IT background are already addressing this capability with suitable architectures, established manufacturers have so far attempted to develop expensive proprietary solutions with mixed results. Consequently, there is a growing willingness within the European automotive industry to collaborate on the development and use of open-source software, beginning with the S-CORE middleware. In his presentation, Professor Eckstein will highlight the challenges involved and the further cooperation required to achieve this.

The lecture series is being held in cooperation with the RWTH Computer Science Department, Forschungszentrum Jülich, the Regional Group of the German Informatics Society (RIA), the Regional Industry Club for Computer Science Aachen (Regina) and the Aachen Group of the German University Association.