The Institute of System Dynamics and Control contributes to the further development and application of advanced control methods to improve the performance, energy efficiency, safety and comfort of complex control systems. The institute is organized in three departments: Vehicle Systems Dynamics, Aircraft Systems Dynamics and Space Systems Dynamics.
The research in the Department of Vehicle Systems Dynamics is focused on the sustainability of mobility and includes, among other things, the development and testing of procedures for monitoring and observing vehicle-track interaction in regular rail operations. On the one hand, these methods enable predictive maintenance of track and vehicle, which is of particular interest in projects with external partners. On the other hand, improved knowledge of the system states also allows for the integration of new control functions, such as mechatronic track guidance. An associated prototype in true scale is currently being built at the DLR site in Oberpfaffenhofen as a test and development environment for track guidance and other innovative functions as part of DLR's Next Generation Train (NGT) concept.

These objectives are associated to the following tasks:

• modeling of tracks, track irregularities, vehicles and running scenarios to represent the vehicle and track dynamics in simulations
• analysis of measurement data from external partners, e.g. for optimization-based model identification and verification
• design, layout and optimization of model-based observers for the track-vehicle interaction  
• development and testing of concepts for the integration of data-based machine learning approaches into observer design
• real-time capable implementation of the observer and its demonstration in software and hardware-in-the-loop scenarios including the true scale prototype as development environment
• preparation of results and their presentation to DLR-internal and external partners in joint projects

We offer you the opportunity to work scientifically within research projects and to write a dissertation in cooperation with an university.