Courses

Content

In the first semester, the students learn the fundamentals of programming with the goal to independently solve calculation and simulation tasks in the areas of economics and engineering. Furthermore, the students are being introduced to the use of a signal flow orientated graphical programming environment.

Further information can be found in OPAL.

Content

In this course, the students acquire specialised knowledge as well as abilities in the area of scientific and practical work through a project work about a topic given by the chair.

All further information can be found in OPAL.

Content

The objective of this course is to introduce basic economic problems of transport and logistics companies. The students therefore acquire profound knowledge about methods for analysing and solving scheduling problems in the management of transport and logistics companies.

The documents of this course can be found in OPAL.

Content

In this course, the students gain knowledge about the price fixing of services in networks ("revenue management") and get to know methods for solving scheduling problems of the revenue management. 

The documents of this course can be found in OPAL.

Content

This seminar is exclusively for students of the bachelor degree program “Verkehrswirtschaft”. During the semester, every participant of the seminar has to write a paper about a topic given by the chair that comes from current research- or third-party funds projects. At the end of the semester, the results have to be presented including a discussion about them.

Further information can be found in OPAL.

Content

In this course, the students get to know methods and models of the Operations Research, in particular also decomposition methods that can be used for solving various optimisation problems. Furthermore, the students are put in a position to use an optimisation software for solving complex problems.

Documents

The documents for the course can be found in OPAL.

Content

Solving complex logistical decision problems requires the use of modern computer systems. The discipline of Operations Research provides various tools for the formal presentation (“modelling”) of these decision tasks and offers optimising decision algorithms (“model solution”). However, the application of those algorithms in the practice has just a very limited usefulness, as the complexity of the models often leads to prohibitive long calculation times. In these situations, it is often helpful to use so-called heuristic decision-making procedures (“heuristics”). Those cannot give a guarantee for finding an optimal solution, but they can find good solutions (“approximations”) for a model in an acceptable time.

Within the scope of this lecture, selected aspects of the conception of heuristics, the prototypical implementation as well as the computer-aided test of heuristic methods are covered. This is done with selected decision problems of the vehicle deployment planning that serve as examples for complex decision situations where standard software is not sufficient for identifying a good model solution. The lectures are divided into five parts:

Part A: Limits for the use of standard software
Part B: Basic concepts of the heuristic search
Part C: Metastrategies of the local search
Part D: Evaluation-based heuristics
Part E: Metaheuristics

Previous knowledge

For this course, it is expected to have knowledge that is comparable to what is lectured in transport economic fundamental courses. Furthermore, the successful participation of the course “Operations Research and Logistics” is required. Moreover, for passing this module programming skills are necessary. Therefore, a block event on the introduction to the programming language C++ is offered at the beginning of the lecture period. Experiences with Excel and an algebraic modeling environment (e.g. GAMS or OPL) are required as well.

Important information:
Students doing a diploma degree program at the Faculty of Business and Economics cannot be examined in this lecture. Therefore, those students cannot gain Credit Points through attending this course.

Documents

The documents for this course can be found in OPAL.

Content

A transport system in public transport can be described by a set of stops and a line network connecting those. In such a system, every stop represents an origin or a destination of passengers. Hereby, the number of passengers who want to get from a specific origin to a specific destination is unknown and can therefore only be estimated. As a result of many of these estimations, one can obtain a so-called Origin-Destination-Matrix (O-D-Matrix). Based on this matrix, a line network and a time table with a high level of service for the public transport can be generated. On that basis, vehicle rotations, services and shift plans can be created. For all of those tasks, several solution approaches are presented in the lecture.

Documents

The documents for this course can be found in OPAL.

Content

In the research seminar, the students are supposed to bring the knowledge and the abilities that were gained in the method module and the specialisation “Transport Services and Logistics” to an advanced level by working on a research paper on their own.

Prerequisites

Passing the courses "Management of Public Transport Systems and Services" and “Decision Support in Logistics” is required.

Registration and dates

Current information can be found in OPAL.