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
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 feasible solutions. The awarded contribution extended Boscia.jl – developed at the Zuse Institute Berlin – with novel Frank-Wolfe-based large neighborhood search heuristics, as well as...Read More
