Fabian Löbel, a PhD student at the Research Campus MODAL’s MobilityLab, and Dr. Niels Lindner, the lab’s head, have won the Best Student Paper Award at the 25th Symposium on Algorithmic Approaches for Transportation Modeling, Optimization and Systems (ATMOS), which was held on September 18-19, 2025, in Warsaw, Poland. Their winning paper, titled “A Geometric Approach to Integrated Periodic Timetabling and Passenger Routing“, offers new insights based on geometric ideas into the notoriously hard problem of determining attractive and efficient...Read More
Luka Stärk and his team mate Carolin Scholl won the DISPLIB 2025 Competition for real-time train dispatching. Their custom branch-and-bound algorithm solved the difficult scheduling problems, many of them even to proven optimality. The innovative method has a parameterized complexity of O(4^k poly(n)), where k is the number of conflicts and n is the number of operations. The international competition was held in two phases, with problem instances published in October 2024 and February 2025, respectively. The winners were announced...Read More
Enrico Bortoletto successfully defended his dissertation “Geometric Advances and Infrastructure Awareness in Periodic Timetabling” at the Institute of Mathematics at Freie Universität Berlin on July 14, 2025. He introduced two novel geometric perspectives on the periodic event scheduling problem, that was hitherto studied in terms of periodic tensions. In the periodic timetabling space, the set of feasible solutions turns out to be a collection of polytropes, i.e., tropical polytopes that are also polytopes in the Euclidean sense. These polytropes have...Read More
