Peter Liggesmeyer
Executive Director
Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering
Since 2015, Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Peter Liggesmeyer has been the Executive Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering IESE in Kaiserslautern. Since 2004, he has been holding the chair of Software Engineering: Dependability in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Kaiserslautern, and since 2014 he has been managing the affairs of the Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI e.V., German Informatics Society) as its President. He is the founder of the Fraunhofer Alliance Embedded Systems, whose speaker he was from 2010 to 2013. From 2004 until 2014, Prof. Liggesmeyer was the Scientific Director of Fraunhofer IESE.
Prof. Liggesmeyer studied Electrical Engineering with an emphasis on Data Technology at the University of Paderborn and obtained his doctorate with honors from Ruhr University Bochum in 1992, where he also completed his habilitation thesis on “Quality Assurance of Software-Intensive Technical Systems” in 2000.
From 2000 to 2004, he was a C4 Professor for Software Engineering and Quality Management at the Institute of Computer Science at the University of Potsdam (HPI).
Further stages of his career included setting up a competence center on “Safety Analysis and Risk Management” in the Central Department of Research and Development of Siemens AG, Munich (1993 to 2000). From 1988 to 1993, he was a researcher at the Chair of Software Technology in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Ruhr University Bochum, where he held regular teaching assignments from 1993 to 2000. Other teaching assignments took him to the Technical Universities of Munich and Ilmenau, and to Friedrich Schiller University Jena. He turned down the offer of a professorship at the Technical University of Ilmenau in 1999.
Prior to being elected President of the Gesellschaft für Informatik, Prof. Liggesmeyer had already been its vice-president and long-time spokesman of both the expert group “Software Technology” and the Division of Software Technology and Information Systems. In the latter capacity, he was a member of the Advisory Board. Prof. Liggesmeyer is a co-founder of the Working Group “Test, Analysis, and Verification of Software” of the GI. He is also a member of the IEEE Computer Society as well as of the Münchener Kreis. Prof. Liggesmeyer has received several scientific awards, including the Software Engineering Award of the Ernst Denert Foundation in 1993. In the context of the Science Year 2014, he was chairman of the jury that selected “Germany’s Digital Minds” on behalf of the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).
Prof. Liggesmeyer is the author of numerous scientific articles and popular books, particularly the standard reference work “Software Quality” (2002, 2nd edition 2009). He is one of the six authors of the National Roadmap Embedded Systems (NRMES). He also participates regularly in many national and international program committees. He has been co-editor of various professional journals, including “Informatik-Spektrum”, “Informatik Forschung & Entwicklung” (both Springer-Verlag), “information technology” (Oldenbourg-Verlag), and “Lecture Notes in Informatics” (GI).
Prof. Liggesmeyer is a member of the scientific steering board of SafeTRANS, a member of the scientific advisory board for the platform “Industry 4.0”, and advisor of the cluster project “fast”. He is also a member of the executive board of the German Chapter of the ACM as well as a member of the expert advisory board of Quality Seal “Software made in Germany”. Prof. Liggesmeyer provides consulting to several institutions on the state and federal level and is a member of the platform “Security, Protection and Trust for the Society and the Economy” of the German National IT Summit. Since 2015, he has also been the chairman of the Commission of Experts for the Bavarian Center for Digitalization (ZD.B). From 2011 to 2014, he was a member of the University Council at the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences by order of the Hessian Ministry for Science and Arts. Furthermore, he was a liaison officer of the German National Academic Foundation (2009 – 2014).
For more than 25 years, Prof. Liggesmeyer has been in frequent demand as a lecturer for industry seminars and has been advising many leading companies in matters of technology issues. He leads several strategic projects at the University of Kaiserslautern that are funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and by the EU. He is a member of the Center for Digital Commercial Vehicle Technology (ZNT) and of the research initiative “amsys”. His research interests are safety and reliability analysis techniques for Cyber-Physical Systems and comprehensive security and safety analysis processes for Smart Ecosystems, primarily in the fields of application are digital commercial vehicle technology, Industry 4.0, and “Smart Rural Areas”. Prof. Liggesmeyer is co-author of several patents.
