Office: 01.11.042

About Me

I joined the Chair of Software and Systems Engineering (Prof. Dr. Pretschner) in September 2022 and I am currently a PhD student. Generally, I am interested in cyber-physical systems (CPS) and modeling and simulation (M&S). My current research interests are scenario-based testing, search-based software testing, and drone swarm controllers. I am interested in developing techniques to generate test cases for cooperating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Prior to joining the chair, I earned a master's degree in aerospace engineering and worked in industry as a systems engineer.

 

Thesis Supervision

If you are interested in working with us, please take a look at the chair's Theses and Projects page.

You are welcome to contact me if you are interested in thesis or guided research supervision; in that case, please include your CV and current grade report/transcript. Additionally, if you are not applying for an existing open topic, please include a topic idea in your message to me by describing the following:

• A research question.
• Ideas for experiments to produce results that may answer the research question.

The titles of completed theses and publications listed below can provide a starting point to understand research questions that are of interest to me.

--- Open (periodically updated) ---

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--- Ongoing ---

Trust-Aware Behavior Correction for Robust and Scalable UAV Swarms	Bachelor's Thesis
Using Surrogate Models on a Per-Agent Basis to Efficiently Generate Robustness Tests for a Swarm	Bachelor's Thesis
Transforming the Search Space to Efficiently Generate Robustness Tests for a Swarm	Bachelor's Thesis

--- Completed ---

(2026) Generating Test Cases for a Scalable UAV Swarm	Bachelor's Thesis
(2026) Generating Tests for UAV Swarms with LOS Sensing in Environments with Occlusions	Bachelor's Thesis
(2026) Accelerating Worst-Case Failure Discovery in UAV Swarms Using Guided Evolutionary Search	Bachelor's Thesis
(2025) Development and Evaluation of Robust UAV Swarm Route Planner	Master's Thesis
(2025) Inaccuracies in UAV Awareness and the Effect on Swarm Robustness	Bachelor's Thesis
(2024) Scenario Parameters for Testing Reactive and Predictive Swarm Controllers	Bachelor's Thesis
(2024) Effectiveness of Search-Based Testing on a Deep Reinforcement-Learned Swarm Controller	Bachelor's Thesis (with S. Speth)
(2024) Optimizing Relevant Quality Attributes of Collaborating Autonomous UAVs	Bachelor's Thesis
(2024) Test Case Generation for Robust Behavior During Component Failures  in Collaborating Autonomous Aerial Vehicles	Master's Thesis (with N. Kolb)
(2023) Applying Safety Testing to Collaborative Unmanned Aerial Vehicles	Bachelor's Thesis (with N. Kolb)

Teaching

Summer 2026	Systems Engineering (BSc Engineering Science) (IN8015)
Summer 2026	Seminar: Challenges in Scenario-based Testing of Cyber-Physical Systems (IN2107, IN0014, IN45163)
Winter 2025-2026	Practical Course: Scenario-Based Testing of Cyber-Physical Vehicles
Summer 2025	Systems Engineering (BSc Engineering Science) (IN8015)
Winter 2024-2025	Practical Course: Scenario-Based Testing of Cyber-Physical Systems
Summer 2024	Systems Engineering (BSc Engineering Science) (IN8015)
Summer 2024	(topic supervisor) Seminar Course: Software Quality (IN0014, IN2107, IN4572)
Winter 2023-2024	(exercise contribution) Advanced Topics of SW Engineering (IN2309, IN2126)
Summer 2023	Systems Engineering (BSc Engineering Science) (IN8015)

 

Publications

D. K. Marson, D. Deldar and A. Pretschner, "System-Level Test Case Generation and Execution for Distributed Cooperative Unmanned Aerial Systems," 2024 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV), Jeju Island, Korea, Republic of, 2024, pp. 1060-1067, doi: 10.1109/IV55156.2024.10588639.

Marson, D., Pretschner, A. Generating Test Cases for Decentralized Swarming Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. J Intell Robot Syst 112, 30 (2026). doi.org/10.1007/s10846-026-02381-1