Congratulations, Martin Sommer!

We congratulate Martin Sommer on the successful defense of his dissertation on February 5, 2026. Martin received his doctorate under Prof. Dr.-Ing. Eric Sax, co-supervisor of the thesis was Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Andreas Oberweis from the Institute of Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods (AIFB).

Under the title "Control-over-the-Air: Distributed control through cloud-based vehicle functions", Martin Sommer addresses a highly topical issue of future automotive software development: the question of how modern vehicle E/E architectures can be extended by cloud-based control functions.

Summary of the dissertation

The dissertation develops a systematic approach to extend vehicle E/E architectures with cloud-based, controlling software functions and evaluates the suitability of various vehicle functions as well as suitable deployment models. HVAC control, for which a cloud-based MPC is implemented and practically validated in two variants - cloud only and fallback - proves to be particularly suitable. The results show energy savings of up to 11% and reliable comfort, with the fallback model being more robust against disconnections. Overall, the work demonstrates the technical feasibility and benefits of the control-over-the-air approach as well as its potential for efficiency, maintainability and scalability.

We are very pleased about this strong scientific achievement and wish Martin all the best for his future career!

To his profile page