Anyone offering a product on the free market wants to keep improving it. In times of dwindling margins and turbulent markets, suppliers are under acute pressure to develop their goods and services. Although the resulting efforts to “optimize” through testing do lead to improvements, companies don’t always exploit the potential of what’s truly possible. The aim of modern simulations/calculations isn’t only to gain a better understanding of actual systems, but also to help improve products. Simply improving isn’t necessarily optimizing.
With WORHP (We Optimize Really Huge Problems), the Steinbeis Research Center for Optimization, Control and Adjustment Control turned methods for mathematical optimization into modern software, which exploits the variance of a simulation model to automatically determine the best-possible optimization solution. Large models are a specialty of WORHP, and are resolved just as thoroughly and efficiently as smaller problems. The European Space Agency (ESA) has already recognized the software’s potential for developing high-tech solutions, and has opted to use WORHP as a European NLP solver.
Prof. Dr. Christof Büskens
Steinbeis Research Center Optimization, Control and Adjustment Control (Grasberg)
su1118@stw.de
Electricity suppliers can expect increasing demands such as the integration of renewable energy. However, as Germany turns away from nuclear power, the public electricity grid is already facing new challenges. To address these, the industry will need new ideas which are currently being discussed under the label “Smart Grid.”
Supplying electricity across the board can only be considered a possibility if safetycritical technical requirements are recognized and defined early on, and standards and guidelines, or even legislation, are put in place accordingly. As part of a project funded by the German Commission for Electrical, Electronic & Information Technologies under DIN and VDE (or DKE), the Steinbeis Research Center for Electrical Networks and Regenerative Energy Sources is currently researching how safety and reliability in the electrical power supply will be affected within a smart grid. Analyzing the current reliability of supplies by looking at key influencers and instruments is helping to identify the need for standardization, with the aim of safeguarding long-term supplies within the smart grid. In doing so, the team is defining measures to keep the grid stable or restore operation. Based on this work, experts will develop a precise overview of standardization needs.
Prof. Dr. Zbigniew Styczynski
Ines Hauer
Steinbeis Research Center Electrical Networks and Regenerative Energy Sources (Magdeburg)
Call centers and telephone hotline operators invest a substantial amount of time and money in improving customer satisfaction. This is done primarily through the training of call center agents. To safeguard quality, managers study recorded calls. Since thousands of calls are generally taken every day in call centers, monitoring has to be limited to a small sample of calls.
The Steinbeis Research Center for Dialogue Systems specializes in the research and development of speech and spoken dialog technologies, and is leader in the field. Using special emotion recognition software, speech technology helps to filter large numbers of calls and identify critical dialogs. This way, the lion’s share of critical interactions can be identified, thus significantly reducing the cost of quality assurance.