Hasso-Plattner-Institut
Prof. Dr. h.c. mult. Hasso Plattner
 

ME310 Projects of the Year 2010-2011

Year 4 and counting for ME310 in Potsdam. One team partnered with École des Ponts ParisTech to work for EADS Innovation Works on the airport of the future. The second team joined Stanford students to let managers use SAP from their Audi cockpit, while driving.

Friendly Airport of the Future (around 2040) – EADS

The Friendly Airport of the Future has to focus on being friendly to the passenger, while remaining sustainable and addressing all types of user groups, despite their age, their flying frequency, their culture or their socio-economic status. The challenge towards 2040 is to make sure that this new airport vision becomes a shared objective for all stakeholders, meaning that it should be economically viable, technically feasible, while still humanly desirable. Why post this question to IT engineers from the HPI and not architects, civil engineers, and aeronautic engineers, one might ask. The answer is simple: because Design Thinking is about getting diverse influences from multidisciplinary teams. In a sense, an airport is a complex system — and complex systems are what computer scientists feel comfortable with. To learn more about this project, also check out Airport2040.com.

Audi ConnecX

Audi and SAP challenged our students to smartly integrate the business world into people's cars. As we all know, handling office duty within the car is distracting and therefore both forbidden and dangerous within the car. The team therefore created an input device - a navigation pad on the lower end of the steering wheel - that allows to control the car's infotainment system without removing the hands from the wheel. In combination with a streamlined User Interface that minimizes the number of interactions necessary to perform that business travellers have to regularly perform.

The system is furthermore tightly integrated with SAP CRM solutions as it stores interactions with customers or leads in the respective company system and, thus, frees users from performing this necessary but time consuming documentation duty after their travels.

In short: More focus, more efficiency, and when you're home, you're done working.