Operations Research

My work in operations research is at the intersection of mathematics, computer science, and management science, driven by exciting applications.

I hold a Doctoral Degree in Operations Research from the Technical University of Munich, Germany and worked as a Research Associate under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Rainer Kolisch. My dissertation titled “Design and Operations of Charging Infrastructure for Commercial Electric Vehicle Fleets — Advanced Algorithms and Practical Applications” was awarded the distinction “Magna Cum Laude”. I was a member of the PhD Program AdONE: Advanced Optimization in a Networked Economy funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG).

My focus and expertise in Operations Research lie in solving transportation and routing problems from the strategic point of view (network design, infrastructure development) and the operational point of view (scheduling vehicles, assigning workers). To solve these problems, I design and implement problem-specific solution approaches and algorithms. My methodological focus has been on a mix of branch-and-price, cutting-plane methods, and heuristic approaches.

My work on electric charging infrastructure has been presented at various operations research conferences (OR, EURO, TSL) and published in:

Gregor Godbersen, Rainer Kolisch, Maximilian Schiffer (2024)
Robust Charging Network Planning for Metropolitan Taxi Fleets.
Transportation Science 58(2). https://doi.org/10.1287/trsc.2022.0207
(Preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.07305)

I have supervised 40 Student Theses over a wide variety of topics ranging from more business focussed, Process Implementation and Preperation for ISO 9001:2015 Certification for a Battery Storage Systems Startup, to implementation heavy An Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search for a Real-World Multi-Attribute Vehicle Routing and Scheduling Problem.

In addition to my academic focus on cutting-edge exact solution methods, I’ve also developed heuristics for solving optimization problems. With my background in Data Science and Software Engineering, I’m equipped to handle end-to-end optimization projects and provide solutions for your real-world challenges from start to finish.

Selected post from by blog

I illustrate some of my work and discuss challenges in optimization problems in these blog posts:

On using operations research to plan social dinners

Reflecting on five years of planning social dinner events using route optimization, open data, and static website generators.

Fast and effective real world routing for a milk startup

In this post I illustrate how readily available open source tools can be used to quickly and effectively solve real-world routing problems. Friends of mine successfully completed a crowd funding campain for their organic milk alternative drink Pläin and deliverd the product themselves to backers.

Kaggle Christmas Challenge 2019

This year I participated in the annual Kaggle Christmas Challenge and will illustrate my approaches. My final model reaches the optimal solution within 37 hours using a linear programming min-cost-flow formulation. A 3% optimality gap is reached within 5 hours.