Student Research Programs

The sponsors and projects for 2015 include:

1. SAP-Innovations Center Potsdam (Biotech)

Company: SAP’s Innovation Center is located in Potsdam, in close proximity to more than 30 renowned educational and research institutions. In recent years Potsdam has emerged as an important center of technological innovation in Germany. The innovation center is involved in the deployment of the new in-memory computing technology introduced by SAP, including SAP High-Performance Analytic Appliance (SAP HANA) software. This technology enables entirely new application scenarios and real-time analyses through the parallel processing of very large data-sets, thus laying the groundwork for intelligent and user-friendly software solutions for the future.

Project: Building on SAP’s newest HANA database technology students will develop new machine-learning techniques to analyze medical massive data sets. First, students will learn the necessary biological foundation needed to successfully complete the project. They will then use data from a large clinical trial to model medical phenomena using latest network-of-networks theory.

2. Deutsche Bahn (German Railways)

Company: Deutsche Bahn (DB) is the main German railway company. It transports on average 5.4 million customers every day over a rail network that consists of 33,500 km of track, and 5,645 train station. DB operates in over 130 countries world-wide. It provides its customers with mobility and logistical services, and operates and controls the related rail, road, ocean and air traffic networks.

Project: This project will help develop new and optimized schedules. In general, there is a trade-off for complex systems between robustness and efficiency. The students will do simulations and develop analytic models to explore this trade-off.

3. SAP AG Walldorf (Supply Chain Management)

Company: Headquartered in Walldorf, Germany, with locations in more than 130 countries, SAP is the market leader in enterprise application software, developing innovations that help businesses run better. SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 248,500 customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably

Project: Supply Chain Management (SCM) deals with the combination of procurement, production, storage, transport and delivery of commodities. Problems of this kind occur in all kinds of industry branches. Since the integrated planning of these processes contains a high potential for optimization it is of great importance for the companies’ efficiency. One method of choice to find optimal solutions in SCM is linear and integer programming. Nevertheless, there are big challenges to overcome (concerning both hardware and algorithms) due to very detailed and therefore large models. This project will aim at implementing state-of-the-art algorithms for computing high-quality solutions within acceptable running times. Selected approaches from the SCM literature will be implemented and compared computationally. An analysis of performance bottlenecks will ideally lead to an improvement of the algorithms for the specific data sets at hand.