Attending the EURO PhD School "Data Science meets Optimisation"

From 25 to 29 August 2025, our colleague Daniel Zähringer took part in the second PhD School of the EURO working group Data Science meets Optimisation (DSO). Doctoral students from all over Europe gathered at Eindhoven University of Technology to learn modern research methods at the interface between operations research (OR) and machine learning (ML) from renowned lecturers, and also had the opportunity to present their own research.

In addition to theory development and hands-on tutorials on black-box optimisation, reinforcement learning for vehicle routing problems, instance space analysis, decision-focused learning and optimal robust decision trees, this year's programme also included a one-day symposium. In addition to further research presentations, companies also presented practical planning problems that are always subject to a number of uncertainties and benefit from the integration of modern ML techniques into classic OR solution methods.