Secure Collaboration on top of the Digital Twin as a Service Platform

Applicants are invited for a PhD fellowship/scholarship at Graduate School of Technical Sciences, Aarhus University, Denmark, within the Electrical and Computer Engineering programme. The position is available from 01 July 2025 or later. You can submit your application via the link under 'how to apply'.

Title
Secure Collaboration on top of the Digital Twin as a Service Platform

Research area and project description
This PhD project focusses on extending an existing digital twin platform called DTaaS with better support for collaboration between different legal entities in a secure manner. Digital twins are software representations of physical assets, processes, or systems. They leverage real-time data to mirror the behaviour and characteristics of their physical counterparts, enabling predictive maintenance, optimization, and improved decision-making in various industries like manufacturing, construction, and urban planning. Secure collaboration facilities in the DTaaS platform allows co-creation of products and services across multiple companies and authorities, thus supporting large virtual enterprises necessary for the development and operation of large scale enterprises, such as critical infrastructures, logistics chains, etc.

The research involves extensions to the DTaaS platform with different security principles and defining security policies that supports co-simulations by multiple autonomous actors. A proof-of-concept of the value of such dynamic collaboration in a System of Systems setting is included with a case centred around Aarhus Festuge. Industrially this new technology is very valuable in order to protect Intellectual Property for the different legal entities and principles for sharing data as the situation changes (using the security policies).

Project description
For technical reasons, you must upload a project description. Please simply copy the project description above and upload it as a PDF in the application.

Qualifications and specific competences
Applicants to the position must have a relevant Master’s degree (120 ECTS) or at least one year of a Master’s degree with relevant courses.

The candidate has at least the following qualifications:

• Cyber-physical modelling and simulation
• Digital Twins
• Security Policies
• Modelling, semantics and proof obligation generation
• Experience with LSP for formal languages, in particular, VDM
• Advanced programming skills

Place of employment and place of work
The place of employment is Aarhus University, and the place of work is Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Helsingforsgade 10, bygning 5123, 8200 Aarhus N., Denmark.

Contacts
Applicants seeking further information regarding the PhD position are invited to contact:

• Peter Gorm Larsen, [email protected] (main supervisor)
• Christian Damsgaard Jensen, [email protected] (co-supervisor)

How to apply
Please follow this link to submit your application.

Application deadline is 18 March 2025 at 23:59 CET

Preferred starting date is 01 July 2025.

For information about application requirements and mandatory attachments, please see our application guide.

Please note:

• Only documents received prior to the application deadline will be evaluated. Thus, documents sent after deadline will not be taken into account.
• The programme committee may request further information or invite the applicant to attend an interview.
• Shortlisting will be used, which means that the evaluation committee only will evaluate the most relevant applications.

Aarhus University’s ambition is to be an attractive and inspiring workplace for all and to foster a culture in which each individual has opportunities to thrive, achieve and develop. We view equality and diversity as assets, and we welcome all applicants. All interested candidates are encouraged to apply, regardless of their personal background. Salary and terms of employment are in accordance with applicable collective agreement.