What I’m interested in:
practical combinatorial problems like
What is the best order for processing these jobs?
How do I best assign these jobs to my staff or my machines?
Which route should my vehicles take?
do usually not have one best solution. I am interested in developing solvers for such problems as well as implementing state-of-the-art user interfaces for them. Good interfaces have to incorporate the experience, knowledge and manifold objectives of the human user. This is the key to excellent practical solutions to real problems.
Highly interactive systems with powerful artificial intelligence and state-of-the-art visualization are what I like to create.
Core Competences
Interactive Business Intelligence Systems
Good decisions are based on the knowledge of all relevant data, personal experience and intelligence. We study systems that find an ideal balance of these factors. Computers visualize data, compute optimal or good solutions, provide what-if scenarios and can track consequences and reasons of decisions. To present this in a way that allows a positive user experience will be a key to successful business intelligence in the years coming.
Optimization
Methods of Artificial Intelligence, Operations Research or Mathematics can provide optimal or good solutions to combinatorial problems. It is well known, that none of these methods performs best in all application domains. Mostly hybrid methods turn out to be the best choice, to meet all functional and non-functional requirements. The latter include performance, being able to provide a solution anytime, quantify the absolute quality of a solution and many more. We provide solutions to practical problems that satisfy such requirements or we find out, why it is not possible to do so.