Team

Alexander Kern studied Mechanical and Process Engineering (MPE) at TU Darmstadt until December 2016. In addition, he participated in the cooperative dual degree program between Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, USA and Technische Universität Darmstadt and successfully completed his master's degree at Virginia Tech as well.

In February 2017, Mr. Kern started his position as a research assistant at the Department of Computer Integrated Design at the Technical University of Darmstadt. Since then, he has been involved in teaching and research on interlinked product creation processes and the topic of industrial digitization. Particular focal points here are the networking and communication of machines and systems as well as associated concepts of industrial IT security.

In the years 2017 to 2020, Mr. Kern took over the supervision of the lecture Interlinked Product Creation Processes and was able to advance it very successfully.

Between 2017 and 2018, Mr. Kern also worked on the IUNO project. Together with several industrial companies and other research institutions, he was involved in the research of secure industrial remote maintenance. At the end of 2017, he additionally took over the management of the coordination office for the IUNO project and thus served as an interface between the IUNO partners.

After the successful completion of the IUNO project, Mr. Kern was able to win a follow-up project in which the IUNO results will be transferred into practical solutions for SMEs. With the project start of IUNO Insec in October 2018, Mr. Kern simultaneously took over the team leadership of the research group “Industrial IT Security” at the department.

In 2020, Mr. Kern was able to successfully complete his PhD on the topic of secure industrial networking with his dissertation “Usage Management for Secure Digital Value Networks”.

Since then, Mr. Kern has been working as a postdoc at the department, taking on both technical and strategic tasks.

Interlinked Product Creation Processes (VPEP)

The lecture Interlinked Product Creation Processes is an elective course for students of the master program and reaches about 300 students per semester. The lecture shows that processes are ever-present in mechanical engineering and that they play a decisive role in the success of product development in particular. Based on process theory and a reference model for product creation, the lecture identifies characteristic processes and presents specific methods for meeting the process objectives. Through the lecture as well as the associated exercises, students build up an understanding of the processes in product creation, learn to master the most important working methods and develop skills to recognize the development progress in processes as well as to control the process flow. In particular, process modeling, analysis, simulation and optimization are important skills to master. The topic complex of Industry 4.0, networking and communication as well as industrial IT security are also important lecture contents, which have become increasingly important, particularly in recent years.

IUNO Insec – Integration and Migration Strategies for Industrial IT Security

IUNO Insec is a BMBF-funded joint research project that further develops the IUNO results and transforms them into practical solutions for SMEs. From 2015 to 2018, IUNO worked on the development of an IT security reference architecture for Industry 4.0 and, within this framework, researched and prototyped methodological approaches for threat and risk assessment of industrial deployment environments as well as solution concepts and demonstrated their added value using demonstrators.

To ensure that the IUNO solutions can be put into productive operation by users, especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), they are being developed in close cooperation with the manufacturing industry and thus made usable in practice.

IUNO – National Reference Project IT Security in Industry 4.0

The goal of the “National Reference Project on IT Security in Industry 4.0” was to effectively protect networked industrial plants from cyber attacks and espionage. Together with seven research institutes and universities as well as fourteen companies from German industry, conducted research to minimize points of attack for hackers. This was done specifically using application focus areas and demonstrators. Methods were developed to simultaneously realize secure processes, secure data and secure services with secure networking.

In October 2018, the IUNO project was successfully concluded with a major closing event in Berlin.