Operations Research at TUM

The Operations Research (OR) group at the Technical University of Munich is doing fundamental research on various aspects of mathematical optimization, (algorithmic) game theory, mechanism design, and AI. The multinational group is led by Alexander von Humboldt-Professor Andreas S. Schulz. It includes researchers spanning various backgrounds and disciplines, from mathematics to computer science and applications in engineering. The OR group maintains close ties with several other researchers at the Technical University of Munich, particularly within the Math and CS Departments and the School of Management, and with colleagues worldwide. In addition, several group members participate in the DFG Graduiertenkolleg “Advanced Optimization in a Networked Economy (AdONE).”

Opportunities

• We are constantly interested in hiring outstanding PhD students and postdocs in Math, OM, OR, TCS, AGT, AI or ML. If you are interested, please send your application to or(at)tum.de.

News

• Our PhD student Felix Buld presented his research on “Scheduling with Testing: Competitive Algorithms for Minimizing the Total Weighted Completion Time in the Adversarial Model” at IJTCS-FAW 2025.
• The paper "Flow shops with reentry: The total weighted completion time objective" by our PhD students Maximilian von Aspern and Felix Buld (together with Nicklas Klein and Michael Pinedo) has been published in the Journal of Scheduling.
• Our PhD student Leander Schnaars has presented his research on "3.415-Approximation for Coflow Scheduling via Iterated Rounding" at ICALP 2025. [arXiv]
• Our former PhD student Carolin Bauerhenne successfully defended her thesis titled "Appointment Scheduling and Routing in Healthcare: Introducing Robust Service Levels" on September 6.
• Maximilian von Aspern, former master's student and current PhD student in the Operations Research Group at TUM, has won the Master Thesis Award from the German Operations Research Society. He received the award during the opening ceremony of OR 2024. He talked about his work on the computational complexity of crane scheduling during the award session.
• Our PhD student Alexander Grosz has given a talk on his work "On the Smoothed Complexity of Combinatorial Local Search" at ICALP 2024. [Proceedings]

See also our News Archive.

Our Network

• Deutsche Mathematiker Vereinigung (DMV)
• DFG Research Training Group AdONE
• EuroTeQ Engineering University
• Gesellschaft für Operations Research (GOR)
• Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS)
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
• Mathematical Optimization Society
• TUM Academic Department of Operations & Technology
• TUM Institute for Advanced Study (IAS)
• TUM Research Group Discrete Optimization
• TUM School of Computation, Information and Technology
• TUM School of Management