Traffic worldwide is on the rise and an increasing number of vehicles on streets have always coincided with traffic problems like congestion, increased accident risk, and also with increased emissions (e.g., greenhouse gas and noise). Already, road congestion is becoming one of the most significant challenges for modern cities. Moreover, the overall amount of people living in urban areas is projected to more than double by 2045 and thus congestion is likely to get much worse.

One promising approach is cooperative traffic participants, such as cooperative driving vehicles. In addition, cooperative air traffic can also supplement road traffic. UAVs or drones are a good example of this. A common basis of cooperation is reliable (wireless) communication between these mobile systems.

For road traffic, platooning is one approach to address the aforementioned problems. Platooning is an ITS (Intelligent Transportation System) application that forms convoys of vehicles and lets them drive in close coordination, keeping a distance of only a few meters between consecutive vehicles.

Platooning tackles safety and congestion problems of modern traffic by cooperatively coordinating vehicles among each other. It involves control theory, dynamics of vehicles, different aspects of communication, and traffic engineering.

For air traffic within cities, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), or drones, are especially considered in the context of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Smart Cities. UAVs are favored for more and more use cases every day, e.g., in the last years, aerial vehicles were used for parcel delivery services – and companies like DHL or UPS have already presented prototypes. Thus, a high volume of UAVs can be expected to be in the air in future smart cities.

My research is focused on cooperative mobile systems in urban and suburban areas. Platooning in such cases is much more dynamic and flexible compared to platooning on freeways since urban areas have varying speed limits, single carriageway, intersections, traffic lights, and even more distinctive features. First results already show the benefit of platooning at urban traffic lights with static traffic light scheduling.

UAVs have the potential to support road traffic as mobile base stations, but also to shift part of the road traffic into the air, e.g. delivery traffic.

Besides the impact on the traffic situation itself, an important research question is the efficient use of the available communication resources. This can be achieved, for example, by combining several technologies, but also by adaptive protocols that make more or less efficient use of available resources based on various parameters.

I received my B.Sc. in Applied Computer Science from the Fachhochschule der Wirtschaft (FHDW) Paderborn in 2011 and my M.Sc. in Computer Science from the Paderborn University in 2015. I joined the Ascora GmbH in northern Germany afterward and worked on national and international BMBF and EU projects. I joined the Cooperative Mobile Systems Group as a PhD Student in 2018.

Research Interests

• Urban Platooning
• Urban Mobility
• Network Simulations
• Drone / UAV Simulations
• Heterogeneous Vehicular Networks
• Inter Vehicle Communication