The Zuse Institute Berlin welcomes the participants of the 2026 Graduate-Level Research in Industrial Projects for Students (G-RIPS) summer program. From June to August, international graduate students from the USA and Europe will work in interdisciplinary teams on research projects that combine mathematical and computational methods with practical challenges from industry and applied science. Organized...Read More
From June 15 to 26, 2026, the Research Campus MODAL at the Zuse Institute Berlin (ZIB) hosted the hybrid PEREGRINE PIPS-IPM++ Hackathon. Part of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWE) funded (03EI1082A-B) PEREGRINE project, the two-week event brought together optimization experts and developers to expand the ecosystem of the parallel open-source...Read More
Gennesaret Kharistio Tjusila, Alexander Hoen, Nils-Christian Kempke, Gioni Mexi, Timo Berthold, Ambros Gleixner, Thorsten Koch, and Sebastian Pokutta won the 2026 Land-Doig MIP Competition, announced at the Mixed-Integer Programming Workshop 2026. The Land-Doig MIP Competition is held yearly in honor of Ailsa H. Land and Alison G. Harcourt (née Doig), the inventors of the branch-and-bound...Read More
Berenike Masing successfully defended her PhD thesis on “Enriched Periodic Timetabling” at the Institute of Mathematics at Freie Universität Berlin on April 29, 2026. The thesis makes substantial progress on the topic of periodic timetabling in public transit with the periodic event scheduling problem (PESP) as its central mathematical framework. It strengthens the theoretical foundations...Read More
On May 11–12, 2026, the annual strategy workshop of the BMFTR’s „Research Campus” funding initiative took place in the MODAL rooms at FUHUB. Under the guidance of PtJ, representatives from the participating research campi engaged in in-depth discussions about the prospects for sustaining their projects. They presented their individual concepts and visions for transferring their...Read More
Am 23. April 2026 hieß das ZIB erneut viele neugierige Schülerinnen zum bundesweiten Girls’Day willkommen. Gemeinsam mit dem Fachbereich Mathematik und Informatik der Freien Universität Berlin boten wir auch in diesem Jahr ein vielseitiges Programm mit etwa 180 Plätzen für Schülerinnen, davon rund 100 am ZIB. Am ZIB konnten die Teilnehmerinnen in acht Workshops Fragestellungen...Read More
Felix Prause successfully defended his PhD thesis on “Predictive Maintenance in Rolling Stock Rotation Planning” at the Institute of Mathematics at Freie Universität Berlin on February 20, 2026. Indeed, keeping trains in good technical condition is a challenging problem, and methods to improve vehicle health and/or save costs are definitely needed. The availability of sensor...Read More
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...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...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...Read More
