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
In preparation for the third phase of the BMBF research campus MODAL, our new industrial partner Stryker Berlin GmbH visited ZIB together with their Freiburg colleagues from Stryker Leibinger GmbH & Co KG, Patient Specific Solutions. The visitors were given an overview of ZIB research in the field of medicine and life sciences in the...Read More
On 28-30 April 2026, the “18th Annual Meeting Photonic Devices” will take place at Zuse Institute Berlin. The AMPD 2026 workshop will focus on photonic devices, with an emphasis on numerical methods and on nanophotonics from fundamental research to applications. The aim is an active exchange of ideas, methods, and results between dynamic science and...Read More
