New Faces and Positions

In 2013 our research group has been extended with two new doctoral students, Kristine Rinke and Stephan Sorgatz. Kristine will work on modeling and control of chemotherapy for leucemia. Stephan will look at intelligent ways for cars to interact with other cars and traffic light systems. Nevertheless, last year's cutest new face certainly is Hanna, Michael Jung's daughter.

Christian was offered and accepted a position as head of the Junior Research Group Optimization of Uncertain Systems at the Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing in Heidelberg.

Completed Theses

Not only could we welcome new students to our family, but there have been several completed projects as well.
Dr. Michael Jung, Dr. Sabrina Kellner and Dr. Lilian Kramer have finished their Ph.D. theses in Heidelberg.

Michael's thesis Relaxations and Approximations for Mixed-Integer Optimal Control addresses combinatorial structures in optimal control and efficient algorithms to cope with them. Lilian developed a new decomposition approach for constrained optimization problems in her thesis Modeling Price Formation in a Multi-Commodity Market - A Graph-Theoretical Decomposition Approach to Complexity Reduction. Within the same joint project, Sabrina found a new mathematical model for price-demand relations, described in her thesis Modeling and Analysis of Demand for Commodities and a Case Study of the Petrochemical Market.

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Also in Magdeburg, theses have been successfully finished. Christian Laus' master thesis Mathematische Modellierung und Optimierung der Vorfeldkontrolle am Beispiel des Frankfurter Flughafens was based on a joint project with Fraport, the Frankfurt Airport. He investigated graph optimization problems related with the control of landed airplanes and proved related complexity results. Robert Scholz's bachelor thesis Obere Schranken für die Kusszahl addresses the famous geometric problem of the kissing number in higher dimensions and gives a nice overview over recent work by Bachoc, Musin, Vallentin, and others. Sarah Heckels's bachelor thesis Lineares Programm zur Prototypenbestimmung für das permutationsbasierte Indexverfahreny deals with a new application for optimization in computer science.

Celebrations

Sebastian and Carola got married on October 2nd. Back to work, Sebastian found his office filled with balloons, hiding not only his desk but also some mathematically influenced wedding presents.

We also celebrated the milestone birthdays of Georg Bock and Johannes Schlöder, one with a surprising workshop or colloquium, the other with a small barbecue party. Part of the group, Flo and Michael, arranged for musical entertainment at Johannes' birthday party.

Michael, Christian, and Sebastian participated also in the special event in honor of Martin Grötschel's 65. birthday in Cologne.

Projects

With a separate stream of four sessions at the 12th European Control Conference in Zurich, Switzerland, the EU project Embedded Optimization for Resource Constrained Platforms (EMBOCON) ended in July.

In turn the GOSSIP project concerning mixed-integer nonlinear programming and optimal control of strongly coupled industrial processes started last year as a part of the BMBF program Mathematik für Innovation in Industrie und Dienstleistungen.

Moreover, funded by the Klaus-Tschira-Stiftung the project Inverse Simulation for Cardiac Arrhythmia commenced.

Conferences and Publications

Beside the ECC in Zurich, a large part of our group presented their work at the International Conference on Continuous Optimization in Lisbon, Portugal, in the end of July. The group participated in the organization of the 5th Magdeburger Mathenachtstraum.

Furthermore, we could publish our past year's work in many articles.

• P. Belotti, C. Kirches, S. Leyffer, J. Linderoth, J. Luedtke & A. Mahajan. Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Optimization. Acta Numerica. 22, pp. 1–131. 2013.
• M. Engelhart, J. Funke & S. Sager. A Decomposition Approach for a New Test-Scenario in Complex Problem Solving. Journal of Computational Science 4(4), pp. 245–254. 2013.
• J. Frasch, A. Gray, M. Zanon, H. Ferreau, S. Sager, F. Borrelli & M. Diehl. An Auto-generated Nonlinear MPC Algorithm for Real-Time Obstacle Avoidance of Ground Vehicles. Proceedings of the 12th European Control Conference, pp. 4136–4141. 2013.
• J. Frasch, M. Vukov, H. Ferreau & M. Diehl. A dual Newton strategy for the efficient solution of sparse quadratic programs arising in SQP-based nonlinear MPC. 2013.
• F. Hante & S. Sager. Relaxation Methods for Mixed-Integer Optimal Control of Partial Differential Equations. Computational Optimization and Applications 55(1), pp. 197–225. 2013.
• C. Kirches, H. Bock, J. Schlöder & S. Sager. Mixed-integer NMPC for predictive cruise control of heavy-duty trucks. Proceedings of the 12th European Control Conference, pp. 4118–4123. 2013.
• C. Kirches & S. Leyffer. TACO – A Toolkit for AMPL Control Optimization. Mathematical Programming Computation 5(3), pp. 227–265. 2013.
• C. Kirches, A. Potschka, H. Bock & S. Sager. A Parametric Active Set Method for a Subclass of Quadratic Programs with Vanishing Constraints. Pacific Journal of Optimization 9(2), pp 275–299. 2013.
• A. Kozma, J. Frasch & M. Diehl. A Distributed Method for Convex Quadratic Programming Problems Arising in Optimal Control of Distributed Systems. Proceedings of the 52nd Conference on Decision and Control, pp. 1526–1531. 2013.
• S. Sager. Sampling Decisions in Optimum Experimental Design in the Light of Pontryagin's Maximum Principle. SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization 51(4), pp. 3181–3207. 2013.
• M. Zanon, J. Frasch & M. Diehl. Nonlinear Moving Horizon Estimation for Combined State and Friction Coefficient Estimation in Autonomous Driving. Proceedings of the 12th European Control Conference, pp. 4130–4135. 2013.