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 data makes it possible for the first time to change from preventive maintenance, which is based on the current condition, to predictive maintenance, which is...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 Approach to Integrated Periodic Timetabling and Passenger Routing“, offers new insights based on geometric ideas into the notoriously hard problem of determining attractive and efficient...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 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
