This year’s Ressel Award of the TU Wien goes to two exceptional young researchers: Computer scientist Lucas Kletzander from TU Wien Informatics and civil engineer Julia Reisinger. Every year, TU Wien awards the Ressel Award for interdisciplinary, application-oriented research. It is awarded to young researchers who have drawn particular attention to themselves through their outstanding dissertations. This year, two researchers receive the Ressel Award. Both developed novel methods to help people plan critical everyday tasks. Computer scientist Lucas Kletzander researches new technologies that develop smarter and more efficient workforce schedules, used for example, in shift work. The awards ceremony took place on October 20, 2023.

Digital solutions for scheduling problems

Many people do not have fixed working hours but have to negotiate their duty rosters in a rather complicated way: shift schedules have to be coordinated, tasks have to be distributed, unnecessarily long breaks and unpaid idle time should be avoided.

Such duty rosters were created manually for a long time – but it can be done better. Lucas Kletzander is working on mathematical-logical methods for getting as close to the optimal staffing schedule as possible. Contrary to common belief, trying out all the theoretically possible variants and selecting the best one is technically impossible. It would take an immeasurably long time, even with the best supercomputers in the world. Now, however, there are sophisticated methods to achieve excellent results in a manageable amount of computing time. These methods can be flexibly applied to different types of scheduling problems. Kletzander demonstrated this by calculating shift plans for bus trips.

Lucas Kletzander is from Lower Austria. He studied Informatics at TU Wien and worked various jobs during his studies, for example as a software developer for mobile apps. In 2016, he became a project assistant at the Institute for Logic and Computation at TU Wien Informatics, where he wrote his doctoral thesis sub auspiciis praesidentis in 2022, supervised by Nysret Musliu. He is now a PostDoc Researcher at the Research Unit for Database and Artificial Intelligence.

About the TU Wien Ressel Award

The Ressel Award, awarded once a year by the Rectorate of TU Wien, honors excellent dissertation projects directly related to interdisciplinary third-party research and carried out in cooperative projects with companies as research partners. It is endowed with 13,000 euros.

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