Guest Scientist From the Indian Institute of Technology Mumbai

Prof. Narayan Rangaraj Is the First Fellow of the Fraunhofer ITWM

Press Release / June 22, 2022

Science lives from the exchange, not only with the colleagues on site; equally important are impulses from outside. Therefore, the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM has established a Fellow Program: Prominent guest scientists come to the institute for a maximum of six months and dedicate themselves to a topic together with our researchers. In order that all employees of the Fraunhofer ITWM benefit from the exchange, the fellows give a guest lecture and offer a colloquium.

The first guest is Prof. Narayan Rangaraj from the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai. He is a professor of industrial engineering and operations research and works in the fields of transportation planning (especially railroad operations), logistics and supply chain management, production planning, and recently also applications in health care. He will visit Fraunhofer ITWM in June and July 2022. We asked him a few questions about his stay:

Where does your connection to the Fraunhofer ITWM come from?

My first experience with Fraunhofer was a short visit to the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics IML in Dortmund, where I visited Prof Uwe Calusen in 2013, but the connection with Fraunhofer ITWM is through the current Director Prof Anita Schöbel, who I know through her work in applications of operations research to public transport systems and other areas. During a short visit in Kaiserslautern in 2019, I found that there are quite a few other groups working in applied areas of my interest, including health care.

Which topics will you deal with during your two months at Fraunhofer ITWM?

I hope to work in the areas of transport planning in an integrated manner, both public systems that provide passenger and freight transport as well as industrial logistics, including warehousing and more generally, supply chains. I hope to also initiate some connections with the health care group, in areas to do with data driven approaches to diagnostics and treatment.

© Fraunhofer ITWM
Prof. Rangaraj during his guest lecture on »Large Unstructured Decisions in Transport Planning and Logistics«

The industry driven approach to the research areas taken up here is promising and though the business and governance environments in India and Germany are quite different, I hope to initiate some activity of joint interest.

You already know Kaiserslautern from previous stays; what do you like about the city? What do you think about the research environment?

I find that Fraunhofer ITWM itself has a large core of scientific personnel, and I think together with the other institutions in the area, most notably TU Kaiserslautern, the research base is very strong.
About the city, it is in a beautiful part of the country and though I am not a very active outdoors person, I hope to explore some of the areas around.

The town itself is just the right size: big enough to have a variety of activities and good public transport, but not so big as to be impersonal and congested and with the problems of big cities. Also, I see that FC Kaiserslautern has returned to the Bundesliga 2 after quite some years, so this bodes well for the city!

What is your preferred mode of transportation?

I do not drive, and I am happy to walk even medium and sometimes long distances. I am a fan (and also a student!) of public transportation, so I use it quite extensively. If I get access to it, I may try to bicycle around the city a little, as well.

You probably know about the current 9€ ticket. How do you rate that?

As a user of public transport, this was one of the first things I got for myself, upon arrival. For me, the big thing is that it removes the barrier of finding the appropriate ticketing option when moving around in various towns and cities. That is empowering.

About its intended impact, I am puzzled. The government would have thought it through, I presume. I cannot see car users shifting to public transport, if that was the intention, because cost is maybe not the main reason for not using public transport. But I can see that a lot of optional recreational and local tourist travel may happen, especially on weekends, and while this may strain the transport services, it may provide a spur to local spending in various parts of the country, which is probably much needed after the corona crisis.

Finally, ticketing was one way to gather detailed information and monitor travel demand and plan for it, but with this ticket, at least for three months, that mode of planning has to be suspended!

Download Picture: Fellow Prof. Narayan Rangaraj [ JPG 0.16 MB ]

Press Release