Press Releases

The Foam Expo trade fair, which takes place in Stuttgart from December 5 to 7, promises new connections and new insights. The researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM in Kaiserslautern are taking the latter literally: the FOAM software enables insights into the microstructure of a wide variety of foams. The tool will be presented in Hall 1 at Booth 250.

From 12 to 17 November 2023 in Denver, Colorado, everything will revolve around the topics of »High Performance Computing«, »Networking«, »Storage« and »Analysis«. The Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM in Kaiserslautern will be presenting the groundbreaking exascale-capable tools, the well-known parallel file system »BeeGFS«, the Fraunhofer STX processor technology and much more at booth 1563!

On November 7 and 8, 2023, everything in the Stuttgart trade fair halls will revolve around industrial maintenance and smart maintenance of production facilities. The Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM in Kaiserslautern will present its software solutions in the Innovation Area in Hall 2A.

The desired heat turnaround focuses not only on district heating, but also on local heating. Thanks to shorter distances from generation to consumers, energy losses in the network are lower. Optimal control of combined heat and power plants can also save energy. In a pilot project with RheinEnergie AG, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM in Kaiserslautern are exploring this potential with the help of artificial intelligence (AI).

This year, Tania Jacob received the award of the Sparkassen Stiftung Kaiserslautern for her master's thesis. She talks to us about the award, her unusual career path, and her work at Fraunhofer ITWM.

KLAIM provides a platform for mathematicians from academia, research labs and industry to exchange ideas and present recent results. The focus of the second KLAIM conference is on the synthesis of models and data, the current research focus of Prof. Dr. Gitta Kutyniok. She holds the Chair of Mathematical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence Understanding at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich and gave the opening lecture at this year's KLAIM.

Quantum computers offer enormous opportunities. With their superior computing power, they have the potential, for example, to solve complex problems in chemical reactions, machine learning or cryptography. To bring them into use more quickly, the German Aerospace Center (DLR) is developing quantum computers, enabling technologies and applications together with partners from industry and research in the DLR Quantum Computing-Initiative (DLR QCI). The Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM is now also involved in the DLR QCI as a contractor: The partners are pooling their expertise to advance quantum technology in the »QUANT²AI" project, which is supported by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection.

For a very long time now, our department »Financial Mathematics« has been working on determining solvency capital, i.e. the capital that insurance companies must hold in reserve in order to be solvent at the end of the year. In order to be able to calculate the so-called solvency ratio, the researchers also rely on Artificial Intelligence. Prof. Dr. Ralf Korn explains how research in this area has developed. He has headed the »Financial Mathematics« department for many years and now contributes his expertise as a consultant and member of the Institute's Scientific Advisory Board.

At this year's annual meeting of the Society for Operations Research (GOR) on August 30, 2023, Prof. Dr. Anita Schöbel received the GOR Science Award. The award is the most important prize awarded by the society and recognizes a scientist every two years for exceptional achievements in developing the focus of »Operations Research«. Schöbel is director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM and professor at the Rhineland-Palatinate Technical University Kaiserslautern-Landau RPTU.

According to the Government Statistics Office, more than 358,000 people were injured in traffic accidents in Germany in 2022. Airbags often prevent more serious injuries. While driving, airbags are normally hidden behind a high-grade plastic panel called a slush skin that envelops large parts of the vehicle’s interior. For the skin to tear open along the right lines, it is perforated meticulously after manufacture. However, for the airbag to fully deploy in an emergency, the material and the intended tear lines must be matched as closely as possible. To make sure this is the case, user-friendly, cutting-edge technology is now used to inspect the slush skins: The Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM in Kaiserslautern has developed a hand-held terahertz measurement system for individual, non-destructive quality control of slush skins.