Historie
Professor Gerhart Potthof during a lecture (14.5.1959), reference: "Die Eisenbahnbetriebsstudenten 1955-1959 und ihr Hochschullehrer Professor Potthoff"
The history of Traffic Flow Science is highly connected with Professor Gerhart Potthoff. He started his scientific career before World War II and continued 1951 after return from captivity with the appointment as ordinary professor at the "Technische Hochschule Dresden". He led the chair for "Betriebstechnik der Verkehrsmittel". Professor Potthoff focussed his teaching profile on the universal education of students by embedding the teaching contents into a comprehensive thinking comprising all aspects of traffic, transportation and logistics.
By referring his universal mindset to transportation systems in general Traffic Flow Science emerged as new scientific discipline. Thereby the deterministic approach to processes of operation technology became opened up by stochastic methods. This methodic increment permits the transformation of random dependencies in transportation systems into mathematic modells close to reality and thus the analysis of transportation systems. The resulting scientific findings are consolidated in his five-volume textbook collection "Verkehrsströmungslehre". His teaching methods became generally known as "Dresdner Schule". The mindset comprehensing the overall system documented in this textbook collection illustrate the system charakteristics of total transportation engineering referring both railway and all other means of transport.
After Professor Potthoffs retirement in 1973 researchers of his education continued his research and teaching approach as staff members of the "Hochschule für Verkehr" (HfV) in the scientific discipline of Traffic Flow Science. Subsequent professor were inter alia:
- Professor Klaus Fischer,
- Professor Horst Krampe,
- Professor Klaus Fischer,
- Professor Karl-Heinz Stürz,
- Professor Günter Hertel and
- Professor Erhard Weigel.
The quality standards defined by Potthoff regarding a universal education of students, a mindset comprising all means of transport and an improved description of real operation procedures by the combination of deterministic and stochastic methods form the teaching and research profile of the chair.
The Traffic Flow Science received further methodic impulses by the appointment of Professor Karl Nachtigall as ordinary professor in 2000. His research is focussed on the systemic transformation of transportation processes, on their mathematic modelling regarding historically grown structures of stochastic enhanced description of operational processes. In profound knowledge of manifold mathematic models simulation allows in combination with optimization approaches a examination and control of transportation and traffic systems close to reality. For this purpose methods of operations research are conferred to Traffic Flow Science as part of business arithmetics. The system-overlapping mindset as well as the combination of methods aiming at the preferably realistic transformation of transportation and traffic processes and the universal education of students describes the modern philosophy of the chair so that the quality demands of Potthoff are still regarded.