Research Interests

My research interests are basically the development of efficient and high-quality algorithms for (hard) combinatorial optimization problems. The application area changed over time – although the underlying mathematics and algorithmics are the same for all of these application areas.
I started my research career in the field of car sequencing – a problem arising in automotive industry. Here the sequence of vehilces to be produced along the conveyor belt has to be determined such that production costs are minimized while respecting a set of (partly conflicting) constraints.
Later on, I switched to the reconstruction of shredded and hand-torn paper documents. This application mainly arises in the field of forensics. Here, the main goal is to reconstruct the original paper documents.
Currently, I am working in the field of transportation science. My main focus is on transport optimization and logistics arising in the context of transportation science. This covers, among others, vehicle routing problems, route and tour planning, location planning, and lock scheduling in the context of inland navigation. Another large field of application I am currently working on is e-mobility. Furthermore, I am developing, optimising and assessing logistics concepts, e.g., in construction logistics, in the CEP (courier, express, parcel) sector, and circular economy.