Note: This is an automated translation (using DeepL) of the original German article.

Four universities together with dwh and ÖBB Produktion develop research focus area SimBA.

Developments in recent years have clearly shown that our, taken for granted, mobility habits, energy supply and global supply chains are anything but. The Covid 19 pandemic and the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine, together with the tightest possible buffers and stockpiles, have pushed many systems to, and in some cases beyond, their limits. In such a situation, every small additional disruption has the potential to turn into a serious crisis. In light of the climate crisis and the associated need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and thus energy consumption, it is clear that new approaches are needed to solve these challenges.

This is where the research cluster Research Focus Area Simulation-Based Analytics (SimBA) comes in. The goal of the Research Focus Area SimBA is to better understand the socio-economic and socio-ecological systems and their processes in our dynamic and heterogeneous world and, based on this, to make them more sustainable and resilient. The starting point for this is synthetic data obtained by simulating these processes and systems. The data and information obtained in this way flow in turn into information models that describe the interrelationships. The foresighted decisions, which are made based on these information models, can in turn be fed into the simulation models and thus analyzed and evaluated. This iterative cycle makes it possible to improve processes until the desired or accepted balance between ecological and economic targets is found.

This research cooperation, in which dwh GmbH is involved as a corporate partner, emerged from the long-standing collaboration of the Business Analytics Group of the University of Vienna, as well as the Data Science Unit and Computational Statistics Unit of the TU Vienna.

With the three research projects Green TrAIn Plan, Dynamic Tester Routing and VIPES, SimBA has already been able to attract a funding volume of almost 2 million euros (until mid-2025) for research. Currently, four universities (University of Magdeburg and TU Dresden, in addition to the Viennese universities) and two companies (ÖBB Produktion GmbH, in addition to dwh) are are part of the Research Focus Area. Further research projects are already being planned with additional company and university partners.