Dr. Thomas Bauer is senior engineer and project manager in the department of Embedded Software Engineering at the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering IESE in Kaiserslautern (Germany). Dr. Bauer received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Technical University of Kaiserslautern. His research interests comprise the design of large scale system architectures and the verification and validation of technical, software-intensive systems. In recent years he has focused on the usage of virtualization and digital twins for system design and validation. Dr. Bauer has been led various strategic research projects in the area of model-based quality assurance of safety-critical software-intensive systems and manifold industry and consulting projects with companies from the automotive and manufacturing domain.