Researchers from the Technische Universität Berlin, the Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing (BAM), the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology (IPK), the Zuse Institute Berlin (ZIB), and the Social Science Research Centre, Berlin (WZB) are working together in the Collaborative Research Center CRC 1026 "Sustainable Manufacturing - Shaping Global Value Creation". The coordinating university of the CRC 1026 is the Technische Universität Berlin, coordinator: Professor Dr.-Ing. Günther Seliger. The ZIB is participating with two subprojects, "A5 - Multicriteria Optimization" and "A6 - System Dynamics Optimization", within the project area "A - Strategy Development".

In many of today's economical systems the awareness of sustainability issues is still too low. In order to preserve our planet earth for this and future generations it is essential to use finite and regenerative resources as well as human labour in a sensible way. In this CRC, scientists from the production engineering and environmental technologies will thus work together with economists and mathematicians to address the question of how global production and economical operations can be carried out in a sustainable way. Their goal is to develop new virtual and real production processes that demonstrate the supremacy of sustainable methods over consumption-based ones.

In project "A5 - Multicriteria Optimization" we work together with colleagues from the partner institutions to understand the best possible organization of sustainable value creation cycles, taking into account economic, environmental and social objectives. If the main relationships can be quantified, such problems can be formulated as multi-objective optimization problems. Ideally one would like the so-called Pareto-efficient solutions with all the trade-off relations in a clear, i.e., compressed or reduced form, calculated to make informed decisions on this basis. The implementation of this idea is the vision of this project. Multicriteria problems are in general very difficult. The enormous progress in the last 20 years in the area of discrete optimization, now allow for the first time to address such problems. The field of sustainable value creation, with its modular and scalable issues, provides an ideal opportunity for a development path that progresses in a meaningful way from small and simple towards large and complex applications. The project aims to develop algorithms that are usable in practice for solving discrete multicriteria optimization problems based on methods of mixed-integer programming. At the beginning of a general, broadly applicable method is developed, which is later supplemented by special methods, especially to enhance its performance. The approximation or reduction of high-dimensional Pareto-sets is a priority. As an algorithmic basis of the project serves the C++ framework of SCIP for mono-criteria mixed-integer programming.

In project "A6 - Optimization and System Dynamics" we consider the transition of today's dominant, consumption-oriented economical systems into sustainable ones. This leads to mathematical models, which are referred to as continuous, deterministic dynamical systems. They are typically described by ordinary differential equations over time. They describe how a system behaves starting from a given initial condition within a specified time period. As part of the CRC we will develop models with the scientists from the other institutions, which describe the transition from unsustainable to sustainable economical and production system. These models contain a number of parameters that represent external adjustment, which have counterparts in the real world (e.g., prices, taxes, or incentives). To find out the best-possible settings of the adjustment variables with respect to some sustainability indicators, methods of linear and mixed-integer nonlinear optimization will be applied.

Software

Project A5 develops PolySCIP, a solver for multicriteria linear and multicriteria (mixed) integer problems.