Research Campus MODAL

Dr. Ina Czyborra, Senatorin für Wissenschaft, Gesundheit und Pflege des Landes Berlin, Prof. Dr. Günter Ziegler, Präsident der Freien Universität Berlin, Dr. Karsten Hess, Referatsleiter Universum und Materie im BMFTR, Bundesministerium für Forschung, Technologie und Raumfahrt at the opening of MODAL's third funding period, @freieuniversitaet.bsky.social @gmziegler.bsky.social‬ @zuseinstitute.bsky.social @mathplusberlin.bsky.social @senbjf.bsky.social‬ ( c ) ZIB

MODAL - Smart Solutions for the Digital Society - BMFTR, German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology, and Space highlights MODAL's third funding period:
www.forschungscampus.bmbf.de/aktuelles/st...

Image: M.H. at META2025, Malaga, upcoming presentation: "Physics Informed Bayesian Optimization For Efficient Solution Of Inverse Problems In Nanophotonics" Abstract: We introduce physics-informed multi-channel Bayesian optimization for inverse design problems in nanophotonics and nanometrology. By learning vector-valued physical properties of numerically simulated systems, from which the final cost is constructed, our approach achieves faster convergence compared to other optimization methods, enhancing efficiency in solving inverse problems across engineering and physics.

Martin Hammerschmidt, CEO @JCMwave.bsky.social, presents MODAL-#NanoLab results at the 15th International Conference on Metamaterials, Photonic Crystals and Plasmonics, META 2025, Malaga, Spain, 23 July 2025. #MachineLearning #BayesianOptimization @cnoatzib.bsky.social‬,
Inv Talk in Session 2A10.

Enrico Bortoletto introduced two novel geometric perspectives on the periodic event scheduling problem, that was hitherto studied in terms of periodic tensions. In the periodic timetabling space, the set of feasible solutions turns out to be a collection of polytropes, i.e., tropical polytopes that are also polytopes in the Euclidean sense. These polytropes have a neighborhood structure that arises from flips in periodic tensions, and that in turn gives rise to a new tropical neighborhood search algorithm. This method effectively complements existing methods and fueled the discovery of new best solutions to five of the twenty-two instances of the PESPLIB, a collection notoriously difficult benchmark testset for periodic timetabling. In the cycle offset space, the fractional solutions produce a cographic zonotope feature a fine tiling, in which the maximal tiles correspond in a duality relation with the feasible timetables. Furthermore, the volume of the cographic zonotope equals the number of spanning trees, and a scaled version provides a lower bound for the width of a cycle basis, two result that are interesting in their own right. Cycles are also the key to deal with constraints on the occupation of infrastructure elements that ensure, e.g., that at any time only one train is scheduled to be at any platform; these inability to deal with such constraints has been a major problem in practical applications, in particular, in the timetabling for construction sites. By a canonical extension of the standard periodic timetabling formulation, such constraints can now be dealt with efficiently, as the thesis demonstrates at the example of scenarios at the S-Bahn Berlin. Photo (l to r) P. Schiewe, C Haase, E Bortoletto, R Borndörfer, A Freyer. https://www.zib.de/research/projects/modal-mobilitylab https://www.zib.de/research/projects/algebraic-and-tropical-methods-periodic-timetabling https://mathplus.de/research-2/application-areas/aa3-next-generation-networks/aa3-8/

Enrico Bortoletto successfully defended his PhD dissertation “Geometric Advances and Infrastructure Awareness in Periodic Timetabling” at the Institute of Mathematics at Freie Universität Berlin on July 14, 2025, @zuseinstitute.bsky.social @mathplusberlin.bsky.social @fc-modal.bsky.social‬

Image: Solar TAP Online Workshop on Digital Twins for Emerging Photovoltaics, https://solartap.de/events/solar-tap-online-workshop-on-digital-twins-for-emerging-photovoltaics/

Solar TAP Online Workshop on Digital Twins for Emerging #Photovoltaics, 30.06.-01.07.2025: solartap.de/events/ features a session on Optical Simulations with #JCMsuite by #JCMwave #SolarTAP @fc-modal.bsky.social‬ @kit.edu‬ @crockstuhl.bsky.social

On the occasion, Thorsten Koch crated cocktails in the colors of Forschungscampus MODAL

Opening speeches given by Ina Czyborra, Karsten Hess, @gmziegler.bsky.social‬, Carsten Busch, Thomas Herrmann, Thomas Meißner, Ralf Borndörfer, and Sebastian Pokutta! Highlights from the labs: EnergyLab, MedLab, MobilityLab, NanoLab, HPCLab, SynLab

Opening of MODAL / Phase3 on 16 June 2025 & Inauguration party of new #FUHUB labs and offices at #FUBIC @zuseinstitute.bsky.social @freieuniversitaet.bsky.social @mathplusberlin.bsky.social @htwberlin.bsky.social‬

Gioni Mexi, Deborah Hendrych, Sébastien Designolle, Mathieu Besançon, and Sebastian Pokutta were awarded the Land-Doig Competition Prize 2025 at the Mixed-Integer Programming Workshop 2025 for the best contribution to the heuristic solution of Mixed-Integer Quadratic Optimization Problems (MIQP and MIQCQP). The competition focused on the development of innovative primal heuristics that can quickly generate high-quality feasible solutions. The awarded contribution extended Boscia.jl - developed at the Zuse Institute Berlin - with novel Frank-Wolfe-based large neighborhood search heuristics, as well as gradient- and decomposition-based heuristics, specifically designed for quadratic optimization problems. The method found feasible solutions for 88 out of 95 benchmark instances, on average in just 12.8 seconds, and achieved a mean optimality gap of 5.1%. In addition, it improved eight best-known solutions in the QPLIB benchmark library. The photo shows, from left to right: Jan Kronqvist, Assistant Professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and member of the competition's organizing team, and Gioni Mexi.

ZIB team of Gioni Mexi and Coauthors wins the Land-Doig MIP Competition at #mip2025 @fc-modal.bsky.social‬ @mathplusberlin.bsky.social
www.zib.de/news/team-wi...

@spie.org‬ Digital Optical Technologies 2025 #LaserMunich: Visit Talk by Ivan Sekulic on Physics informed Bayesian optimization for inverse design of diffractive optical elements! @jcmwave.bsky.social @zuseinstitute.bsky.social @fc-modal.bsky.social‬ #NumericalOptimization #Photonics

Google DeepMind’s #AlphaEvolve recently set records on 13 notoriously difficult math problems. At MODAL we were curious: Could we tackle those with mathematical optimization instead of AI heuristics? Read the FICO blog to learn how we improved on DeepMind’s results:
www.fico.com/blogs/best-g...

MODALs new industrial partner Stryker Berlin GmbH visited MODAL at ZIB together with their Freiburg colleagues from Stryker Leibinger GmbH & Co KG, Patient Specific Solutions. Research in #Medicine #LifeSciences #3Dvisualizations.

The opening of Phase 3 of the MODAL research campus will take place on June 16, 2025 at the FUHUB in Berlin.

The research campus is hosted by ZIB, located at the campus of the FU in Berlin, and conducts research and development of digital systems for the optimization of data-driven processes in the fields of energy, health, mobility and communication.

MODAL is a partnership project of research partners @zuseinstitute.bsky.social & @freieuniversitaet.bsky.social‬ with >30 industrial partners, funded by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space within the “Research Campus – Public-Private Partnership for Innovation” funding initiative.