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Technische Universität München
Foto von Andreas Wiese

Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Andreas Wiese

Research Interests

  • Combinatorial optimization
  • Approximation algorithms
  • Operations research
  • Packing problems
  • Geometric problems
  • Scheduling

Current applied projects

Automatic course planning

At the beginning of each semester, all university students need to plan the courses they want to take this semester. For this, they need to take into account the rules of their degree program, e.g., some courses are compulsory, one needs to complete a certain number of credits from certain groups of courses, or one needs to choose a study focus from some given options. Also, they need to keep in mind the times when the courses are scheduled, that some courses need to be taken in a certain order, and which courses will be offered in the next semesters. Therefore, this planning process is complicated and tedious. In our group, we develop the StudyPlanner, an online tool with which our students in the Department of Mathematics can plan their courses students according to their preferences, from the upcoming semester until the end of their studies, such that all degree rules are automatically fulfilled. The StudyPlanner is available for our students at studyplanner.co.cit.tum.de.


University timetabling (in collaboration with Clemens Thielen)

A common challenge for a university is to make a schedule for its courses, i.e., to plan for each course at what time and in which lecture hall it takes place. In particular, one must ensure that certain lectures cannot take place at the same time, e.g., two compulsory lectures from the same semester of some study program, that the lecture halls have enough capacity for their assigned courses, and that each lecturer teaches a course only at a time when she is available. Ideally, one would like to avoid very long breaks for the students during the day and that too many lectures are scheduled at undesirable times, e.g., Fridays at 6pm. This leads to a complicated optimization problem. In our project, we solve it for the TUM Campus Straubing.


Position assignment

When a TUM employee is hired, she needs to be assigned to a position among those that are available for TUM. However, sometimes positions are only available during a certain time period or are partially blocked by other employees. Therefore, sometimes it is necessary to find several pieces of available positions and stitch them together in a suitable way. In the process, one needs to consider the pay grade of the employee and the position and other factors. In this project, we develop an optimization tool that does this process automatically, taking all relevant factors into account. We develop it in collaboration our colleagues in the adminstration of the School of Computation, Information, and Technology (CIT) in order to help them in the process of assigning new employees.
 

Short CV

  • since 2022 W3-Associate professor at the Technical University of Munich
  • 2021 - 2022 Associate professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
  • 2019 - 2021 Associate professor at the Universidad de Chile in Santiago
  • 2016 - 2019 Adjoint professor at the Universidad de Chile in Santiago
  • 2012 - 2016 Senior researcher and postdoc at the Max-Planck Institut for Informatics in Saarbrücken/Germany
  • 2011 - 2012 Postdoc at the Università di Roma “La Sapienza”
  • 2008 - 2011 Ph.D. at TU Berlin under supervision of Martin Skutella
  • 2002 - 2008 Study of mathematics and computer science at TU Berlin

Selected publications

  • Alexander Armbruster, Lars Rohwedder and Andreas Wiese. A PTAS for minimizing weighted flow time on a single machine. In Proceedings of the 55th Annual Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2023), pages 1335-1344. ACM, 2023.
  • Fabrizio Grandoni, Tobias Mömke, and Andreas Wiese. A PTAS for the Unsplittable Flow on a Path problem. In Proceedings of the 54th Annual Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2022), pages 289-302. ACM, 2022.
  • Lars Rohwedder and Andreas Wiese. A (2+ ε)-approximation algorithm for preemptive weighted flow time on a single machine. In Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2021), pages 1042-1055. ACM, 2021.
  • Fabrizio Grandoni, Tobias Mömke, and Andreas Wiese. Unsplittable Flow on a Path: The Game! In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA 2022), pages 906-926. SIAM 2022.
  • Anna Adamaszek, Sariel Har-Peled, and Andreas Wiese. Approximation Schemes for Independent Set and Sparse Subsets of Polygons. In Journal of the ACM 66(4): 29:1-29:40 (2019). Unifies in particular two extended abstracts published in FOCS 2013 and SODA 2014.
  • Fabrizio Grandoni, Tobias Mömke, Andreas Wiese, and Hang Zhou. A (5/3+ ε) -approximation for unsplittable flow on a path: placing small tasks into boxes. In Proceedings of the 50th Annual Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2018), pages 607-619. ACM, 2018.
  • Sandy Heydrich and Andreas Wiese. Faster approximation schemes for the two-dimensional knapsack problem. ACM Transactions on Algorithms 15: 47:1-47:28 (2019). An extended abstract was published in SODA 2017
  • Waldo Gálvez, Fabrizio Grandoni, Sandy Heydrich, Salvatore Ingala, Arindam Khan and Andreas Wiese: Approximating Geometric Knapsack via L-Packings. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2017), pages 260-271. IEEE, 2017
  • Giorgi Nadiradze and Andreas Wiese. On approximating strip packing with a better ratio than 3/2. In Proceedings of the 27th Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA 2016), pages 1491-1510. SIAM 2016.
  • Anna Adamaszek and Andreas Wiese. A quasi-PTAS for the two-dimensional geometric knapsack problem. In Proceedings of the 26th Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA 2015), pages 149-1505. SIAM 2015.
  • Paul Bonsma, Jens Schulz, and Andreas. Wiese. A constant-factor approximation algorithm for unsplittable flow on paths. SIAM Journal on Computing, 43:767–799, 2014. An extended abstract appeared in the proceedings of FOCS 2011.

All of my publications at DBLP

Service to the academic community

  • Co-organizer of the 16th Latin American Theoretical Informatics Symposium (LATIN 2024)
  • Program committee member of LATIN 2024 (co-PC-chair), WAOA 2023 (co-PC-chair), FOCS 2023, STOC 2023, SODA 2023, ESA 2022, SODA 2022, SoCG 2022, LAGOS 2021, ESA 2020, WAOA 2019, SODA 2018, LATIN 2018, CIAC 2017, ESA 2015, APPROX 2015, WAOA 2015, WAOA 2014, MAPSP 2013, and WAOA 2012
  • Organizer and co-organizer of an annual research workshop at the Universidad de Chile during 2016-2022
  • Co-organizer of the “Summer school in discrete mathematics 2018" in Valparaíso/Chile
  • Organizer of the summer school ADFOCS 2015 at MPI for Informatics in Saarbrücken/Germany
  • Reviewer for the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Israel Science Foundation (ISF), the Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica (CONICYT) in Chile, and the National Science Centre Poland

Supervision

  • Postdocs: Kevin Schewior, Syamantak Das, Hang Zhou, Moritz Buchem, Hugo Kasuya
  • PhD student: Sandy Heydrich (co-advised with Rob van Stee)
  • Master students: Tomas Martinez (co-advised with Ivan Rapaport), Giorgi Nadiradze, Paul Deuker
  • Bachelor student: Sebastian Guerraty (co-advised with Fernando Ordoñez)

Recent Teaching Activities

Wintersemester 2024/25

Titel
Approximation Algorithms [CIT4100003]
Exercises for Approximation Algorithms [CIT4100003]
Hauptseminar: AI in Discrete Optimization

Miscellaneous material

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