Tests of hadronic interaction models by data of the KASCADE-Grande air-shower experiment

KASCADE-Grande is a multi-detector setup to get redundant information on single air shower basis. The information is used to perform multi-parameter analyses to solve the threefold problem of the reconstruction of the unknown primary energy, the primary mass, and to quantify the characteristics of the hadronic interactions in the air-shower development. This contribution discusses the various ways of testing the hadronic interaction mechanisms with data of the original KASCADE experiment and their results, as well as the capabilities in testing the models with the extension of KASCADE, the KASCADE-Grande experiment. Though no hadronic interaction model is fully able to describe the multi-parameter data of KASCADE consistently, the more recent models or improved versions of older models reproduce the data better than a few years ago.