On 22 October 2025, Daniel Kraus successfully defended his doctoral dissertation and passed the examination with distinction.
The dissertation was supervised and evaluated by Ao.Univ.-Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Dr.techn. Erich Leitgeb. Prof. dr. Andrej Kos from the University of Ljubljana served as the external reviewer.
Entitled “Test and Validation Engineering: Innovations in Automotive Support and Recommendation Systems,” the dissertation focuses on the further development of intelligent support systems for vehicle testing and validation in the automotive sector. The objective of the research is to effectively support test and validation engineers through real-time data processing, edge computing, and robust wireless communication in demanding environments.
The first part of the dissertation presents a modular, edge-based real-time monitoring system for vehicles that processes multivariate sensor data directly onboard. By combining rule-based and machine-learning approaches for anomaly detection, event-driven data logging, and optimized ML models for resource-constrained hardware, the analytical effort is reduced and the efficiency of test drives is significantly improved.
The second part addresses wireless sensor communication in electromagnetically challenging environments, such as vehicle engine compartments. A simulation-based antenna recommendation system combines full-wave electromagnetic simulations with ray tracing to identify optimal antenna types and positions. The results demonstrate a high level of agreement between simulation and real-world behavior, enabling a scalable and practical implementation of wireless sensor networks.
Overall, the dissertation makes a substantial contribution to improving the efficiency, reliability, and robustness of test and validation processes in the automotive industry.
We warmly congratulate Dr. Daniel Kraus on this outstanding achievement.
