Demographic change, digitalisation, scarcity of resources and urbanisation - these megatrends mean considerable challenges for our society. The growing cities must be supplied with energy and raw materials and their inhabitants expect contemporary mobility. In order to solve these questions, we conduct research in the following areas:

SmartCycle: Services and concepts for resource-efficient production

Everyone is talking about environmental and climate protection today. At the same time, people's growing needs must be satisfied - and at an economically justifiable cost. One component is the processing and recycling of used products in order to save valuable primary raw materials. [Research projects SC]

SmartMobility: Innovative mobility and logistics concepts

The importance of mobility and logistics has steadily increased in recent years. Today, this sector represents a significant part of the economic output, but also of resource consumption. In order to achieve the ambitious environmental and climate protection goals, innovative concepts are necessary. [Research projects SM]

SmartEnergy: Integration of renewable energies into electricity supply

Fossil energy sources such as hard coal or lignite are available limitedly. Nuclear power plants produce radioactive waste, the final disposal of which is controversial and unresolved. An environmentally friendly, climate friendly and durable power supply is only possible through renewable energies. However, wind power, solar or photovoltaic plants depend on the weather. Their integration into the power supply presents a challenge for the energy industry because electricity is difficult to store and must therefore always be consumed immediately. Against this background, we are researching innovative ways to economically balance supply and demand. [Research projects SE]

Consideration of risk preferences in optimization models

While in practice decision-makers are often risk-averse - for various reasons -, mathematical models often assume risk neutrality. On the one hand, this means simpler models, but at the same time reduces their acceptance in practice. In the worst case, models are not used at all or their results are more or less arbitrarily changed in order to make "less risky" decisions. [Research projects RO]

Capacity control

In order to generate additional demand, providers in numerous industries use price differentiation as is common in the aviation industry, for example, due to different ticket prices for the same routes. As a consequence of such price differentiation, the capacity management must determine how many units of the products (such as seats in the different fares on a particular flight) are to be sold. This task is made more difficult by the fact that demand is uncertain and, in practice, a large number of requests can be received at the same time, the acceptance of which must be decided online. This results in dynamic, stochastic optimization problems. [Research projects CC]

Dynamic pricing

Due to the increasing transformation from a seller's to a buyer's market, companies in the service sector in particular are increasingly confronted with new challenges for their pricing strategies. In most cases, prices can no longer be the same for the entire life cycle of a product, but must rather be dynamically adjusted to the current conditions. Dynamic pricing refers to the – often data-driven -  process by which a provider changes its price at (any) point in the sales process ("dynamically") in order to respond to changes in demand or competition with the aim of maximising total revenue. [Research projects DP]