In 2026, Fraunhofer is performing the project in collaboration with John Deere, and Porsche Informatik, which act as customers for you. We have prepared three exciting projects in which you will work in close collaboration with your industry customers as well as Fraunhofer experts to solve the challenges presented by them.
Here are the key descriptions of the three challenges offered this year:
John Deere
The Topic: 🚜 Quality Assurance for AI-Generated Engineering Artifacts
Join an exciting software engineering project where you’ll explore how AI can assist software development—and measure its impact!
🔍 Project Overview
AI is increasingly used to generate engineering artifacts ranging from requirements and specifications to source code and test cases. While this can significantly accelerate development, it also creates new challenges for quality assurance, as the volume of generated content may exceed the capacity of traditional review processes. This project investigates evidence-based approaches for independent review, verification, and governance of AI-generated artifacts in spec-driven software development.
💡 Your Mission
- Analyze AI-assisted engineering workflows: Examine how generative AI is used to create requirements, specifications, source code, and test cases.
- Design effective review strategies: Develop approaches for reviewing large volumes of AI-generated engineering artifacts efficiently and reliably.
- Enable independent verification: Investigate evidence-based methods to assess artifact quality while maintaining separation of duties between creation and assessment.
- Strengthen human oversight: Explore how engineers can remain accountable and in control when AI supports both development and quality assurance activities.
- Define governance mechanisms: Derive practical guidelines, roles, and best practices for trustworthy AI use in embedded software development.
- Validate your approach: Evaluate the proposed methods using representative embedded-systems development scenarios or engineering artifacts.
🧠 Why you Should Participate:
- Hands-on exposure to AI-assisted development workflows.
- Insights into agricultural technology
- Build quality-assurance expertise: Learn about verification, testing, traceability, review processes, and software governance
- Understand AI: Investigate how AI can be applied responsibly in quality systems development
- Create practical impact: Contribute to methods and best practices that make AI-generated engineering artifacts more reliable and transparent
👥 Who Should Apply?
- Students in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related fields.
- Interest in AI or agriculture is a plus.
Porsche Informatik
The Topic: Revolutionizing Monday Mornings in Car Retail 🚗
Mondays are hectic, especially for car owners dropping off vehicles for scheduled repairs after the weekend. Long lines, unexpected issues, and waiting for systems to load create frustrating bottlenecks. But what if Porsche Informatik, the hub of automotive innovation, could change this?
We’re inviting bold student innovators to help us engineer the future of streamlined car repair experiences—where cutting-edge technology meets ingenious design in the dynamic realm of car retail.
The Challenge: Fix Mondays Before They Break You
Imagine this:
Monday morning, a customer arrives to drop off their car for its pre-booked repair. While the appointment details were set online, there’s still so much to manage:
- Accurately assigning the right mechanic with the certifications needed.
- Ensuring all the required tools and infrastructure are available.
- Verifying if all necessary parts are in stock—and exploring alternatives if not.
- Reviewing warranties, calculating costs, and keeping the process smooth under patchy system availability.
The chaos worsens when systems are down or slower than expected, leaving dealerships scrambling for information, frustrating customers and staff alike.
💡Your Mission: Build Smart Solutions That Keep Calm Under Pressure
As part of this Capstone Challenge, you will tackle two intertwined aspects:
1. Build Resilient Services
Design a scalable solution that prepares data in advance, caches key information, and syncs asynchronously. Whether handling delayed domain events, minimizing latency, or ensuring repair workflows stay uninterrupted, your innovation will lead the charge in building software that performs under pressure.
2. Innovate Intuitive User Experiences
Develop a lightning-fast onboarding process for customers dropping off vehicles:
- Skip irrelevant, time-consuming tasks (e.g., warranty checks or spare part updates) and defer them strategically to later asynchronous channels with customer input.
- Ensure the user-facing experience adapts organically to technical and human constraints, creating smoother interactions—no matter the hiccups.
This is your chance to blend domain-driven design, cloud-first thinking, inventive UX and (what else) AI to turn chaos into order—and smooth Mondays like never before!
🧠 Why you Should Participate:
- Real-world relevance: Work on a solution directly impacting Porsche’s global dealer networks.
- Tech meets design: Apply cutting-edge technologies (resilient APIs, asynchronous processing, UX mockups) to solve customer pain points.
- Impactful innovation: Your project could shape the next generation of car retail!
Put your skills to the test in this high-stakes, fast-paced challenge and join Porsche Informatik’s legacy of driving innovation forward.
Are you ready to reimagine car repairs and revolutionize retail workflows? Apply now and start making Mondays better—for everyone!
Our typical technologies: React, TypeScript