On 24 October 2024, the German Logistics Association (BVL) presented the Science Award Logistics 2024 to our co-founder and CEO Prof. Dr.-Ing. Sebastian Lang at its Supply Chain CX congress in Berlin. The BVL has presented the award since 1992, this year for the 33rd time. It carries €5,000 and was sponsored this year by Hellmann Worldwide Logistics. Jury chair Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. Wolfgang Kersten emphasized that Lang has published his research extensively and made it usable in practice. The laudation was given by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Ludger Overmeyer of Leibniz University Hannover.
The award-winning work
The prize went to the dissertation "Methods of Reinforcement Learning for Production Scheduling", completed at Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg with the grade summa cum laude and published open access by Springer Vieweg in 2023 (DOI 10.1007/978-3-658-41751-2). It was nominated by Lang's doctoral advisor, Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Michael Schenk.
The work joins two fields that rarely meet in practice: reinforcement learning and discrete-event simulation. Lang shows how a learning agent sets production sequences in real time and checks them against real constraints on a simulated model of the shop floor. The approach extends beyond production to fields such as transport planning. The same dissertation also earned the OVGU dissertation prize, the faculty prize for the best doctorate, and the 2023 VDI advancement award.
From research to product
This research shapes the approach Riventic puts into Riventic Flow, our AI-supported production planning. Flow's optimization core couples a discrete-event simulation, a digital model of the shop floor, with genetic algorithms and with models trained on each customer's own production data, for example to predict setup and run times.
