Over the last decades we observed a tremendous increase in the number and variety of requirements on distributed systems following the growth of application areas they are used in and are emerging to. Furthermore, the integration of different applications with different criticality characteristics into a single system, poses a new research challenge to satisfy a multitude of these requirements at the same point in time. In this world of ever growing complexity, there is a demanding need for powerful methods and tools, to support the development and deployment of future distributed systems. Fitting in, computer science has developed theories and remarkable tools that are able to deal with systems of vast complexity as for example model-checkers, interactive theorem provers, or solvers for satisfiability modulo theories (SMT). The main research objective of this research fellowship is the management of complexity via the application of these formal methods to arising problems in distributed systems of mixed-criticality. Such problems are for example computer aided analysis and verification, correct configuration, and computer aided development of generic services. By establishing a deep understanding on the principles of the existing formal methods this research fellowship aims to efficiently apply formal methods to challenging industrial applications of mixed-criticality and to give feedback from these studies to the developments in computer science. Following advanced training in formal methods, the research studies will be carried out in the context of TTEthernet, a novel communication infrastructure that extends the Time-Triggered Architecture with mixed-criticality communication services. The core of TTEthernet is a fault-tolerant synchronization strategy that establishes a synchronized timebase between critical nodes, which is then used to guarantee that the dataflow between these critical nodes is isolated from other, non-critical or low-critical dataflow.