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
Recently, Google DeepMind made waves with a blog post about AlphaEvolve, a new LLM-based tool that writes its own algorithms to crack notoriously difficult math problems. Just weeks after Google published new best-known solutions for 13 previously unsolved problems using AlphaEvolve, a team from the MODAL research campus developed formulations that were solved with FICO...Read More
Gioni Mexi, Deborah Hendrych, Sébastien Designolle, Mathieu Besançon, and Sebastian Pokutta were awarded the Land-Doig Competition Prize 2025 at the Mixed-Integer Programming Workshop 2025 for the best contribution to the heuristic solution of Mixed-Integer Quadratic Optimization Problems (MIQP and MIQCQP). The competition focused on the development of innovative primal heuristics that can quickly generate high-quality...Read More
The MODAL-Forschungscampus proudly announces the successful extension of the MATH+ Cluster of Excellence, which will receive continued funding for another seven years under the Excellence Strategy of the German federal and state governments. This renewed support recognizes the world-class research achievements of the cluster and affirms Berlin’s standing as a global hub for applications-driven mathematical...Read More
