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
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 Xpress, outperforming AlphaEvolve’s results and setting new records in solution quality on several challenging benchmarks, including circle packing and the minimization of distance ratios. This...Read More
