Research Talk "Dynamic Network Routing: Meeting the Challenge of Complex Traffic and Transportation Tasks" by Prof. Dr. Rolf H. Möhring from TU Berlin

Prof. Dr. Rolf H. Möhring from the Fachgebiet Kombinatorische Optimierung und Graphenalgorithmen (COGA) of the Institut für Mathematik at the Technische Universität Berlin (TUB) in Berlin, Germany, visited visited our institute from June 5 to 8, 2018. He presented his research talk "Dynamic Network Routing: Meeting the Challenge of Complex Traffic and Transportation Tasks" on Wednesday, June 6, 2018, at 09:30 AM in the Meeting Room of the Faculty of Computer Science and Technology of Hefei University [合肥学院] Building 36, 3rd Floor, Room 305 [合肥学院 计算机科学与技术系 合肥市 230601蜀山区 经济技术开发区 南2区/南艳湖校区 锦绣大道99号 36栋 305会议室]. The talk was open to all interested audience and very well attended. Here you can find the slides of the talk and here the poster.

Abstract

Traffic management and routing in logistic systems are important. One wants to utilize the available street or logistic network in such a way that the network “load” is minimized or the “throughput” is maximized. The aspects of “time” and “congestion” play a crucial role in these problems and require new techniques that need to integrate dynamic network flows and scheduling. The lecture will illustrate recent developments in this direction on selected applications:

1. Traffic guidance and congestion pricing (cooperation with the ptv AG).
2. Routing automated guided vehicles in container terminals (cooperation with the Hamburger Hafen- und Lagerhaus AG, HHLA).
3. Ship traffic optimization on the Kiel Canal (cooperation with the German Federal Waterways and Shipping Administration).

All these applications benefit from new insights into routing in graphs. In (1), it is a routing scheme that achieves traffic patterns that are close to the system optimum but still respect certain fairness conditions, while in (2) it is a very fast real-time algorithm that avoids collisions, deadlocks, and other conflicts already at route computation. Finally, (3) combines techniques from (2) with special purpose scheduling algorithms.

Short Biography

Prof. Dr. Rolf H. Möhring is a full professor at the Fachgebiet Kombinatorische Optimierung und Graphenalgorithmen (COGA) of the Arbeitsgruppe Diskrete und Algorithmische Mathematik, Institut für Mathematik, Fakultät II - Mathematik und Naturwissenschaften at the Technische Universität Berlin (TUB) in Berlin, Germany. He has received his Diplom (equivalent to MSc), Dr. rer. nat., and Habilitation in Mathematics at the RWTH Aachen in 1973, 1975, and 1982, respectively. He was assistant and associate professor at the University of Hildesheim and then at the University of Bonn, respectively, before joining the TUB in 1987 as full professor. Since 2016, Prof. Möhring is Professor Emeritus at TUB and Member of the Board of Directors of the Beijing Institute for Scientific and Engineering Computing (BISEC) [北京科学与工程计算研究院] of the Beijing University of Technology (BJUT) [北京工业大学] in Beijing [北京], China.

Prof. Möhring is an outstanding scholar in the fields of graph and network algorithms, combinatorial optimization, scheduling, operations research, and their industrial applications. His research works have been cited 2700 times in the past five years alone. He has received several international honors, such as the 1995 Harris German-Dartmouth Distinguished Visiting Professor of the Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA, the Wissenschaftspreis der Gesellschaft für Operations Research (GOR, 2005), the Gold Medal of the Association of European Operational Research Societies (EURO, 2010), and the Honorary Professor title of the Beijing University of Technology (BJUT) in 2014.

As member of the Editorial Board, he contributed to several prestigious journals such as Discrete Applied Mathematics, the Journal of Scheduling, Management Science, Mathematical Methods of Operations Research (MMOR), Operations Research, ORDER – A Journal on Ordered Sets and its Applications, and the SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics and he has been organizer of events such as the International Conference on Operations Research (OR'94) and the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM'98), as well as of several workshops and Dagstuhl Seminars. Prof. Möhring has held several important positions in national and international societies, including President of the Gesellschaft für Mathematik, Ökonomie und Operations Research (GMÖOR, 1994–1996), Chair of the Executive Committee (1992–1995) and President (2004–2007) of the Mathematical Programming Society (now Mathematical Optimization Society, MOS), and member of the DFG Research Center Matheon "Mathematics for Key Technologies," where he was in charge of the Application Area "Logistics, Traffic, and Telecommunication Networks".

Photos

Literature

1. Zijun Wu, Rolf H. Möhring, Dachuan Xu. Selfishness need not be bad: A General Proof. arXiv:1805.07762 [cs.GT]
2. Zijun Wu, Rolf H. Moehring, Yanyan Chen. Selfishness need not be bad. arXiv:1712.07464 [cs.GT].