Transportation

Research on transportation focuses on the optimal movement of goods and units in a network. This comprises routing as well as scheduling decisions.

Transport planning

Large companies and package delivery services constantly have to face the problem of having to deliver several products from a depot or warehouse to a set of customers. To minimize the transportation costs these problems can be modeled for example as Vehicle Routing Problems. The solution will then tell the company, which vehicle shall deliver which product to which customer.

In practice, other factors like volatile demand need to be considered as well. Moreover, travel time between customers can fluctuate over the day. We develope models which consider all these constraints and solution methods for calculating robust solutions for routing under uncertainty.

Mobility

Technological advances like mobile communication, machine-to-machine communication and autonomous driving as well as social trends like the Sharing Economy and urbanization lead to new mobility concepts. Bike-sharing and car-sharing services as well as ride-hailing and ride-sharing have experienced a rapid growth in the last decade. With the upcoming of autonomous driving vehicles, these systems will evolve and merge into mobility-on-demand systems. Applying methods from Operations Research can help to increase the efficiency of those systems.