Fewer empty kilometres on Austria’s railways

At present, an ÖBB dispatcher still has to manually assign empty freight wagons to requests from clients. The aim of the project “Partially Automated Empty Wagon Dispatching” is to support this process with software that suggests optimal utilisation. The research forms part of the TARO project, with which ÖBB aims to leverage automation and digitalisation to increase its capacities, boost productivity and thereby ensure high quality.

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Green Supercomputing: Processing large data volumes more energy-efficiently

Vast quantities of data also signify huge energy consumption. Developers face the task of processing so-called “massive graphs”, i.e. enormous amounts of information and relationships between information nodes, and they have to do this in times when energy is in increasingly short supply. For almost a year, researchers involved in an EU Horizon project have been working on a holistic model to address the ongoing challenges. The goal is, among other things, an energy label for software codes (just like on refrigerators).

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Do decisions turn out better when they are taken by multiple people?

What happens when strategic decisions are not reached in the boardroom, but by a large number of stakeholders? Ali Banihashemi models the long-term impact of open strategy on companies and institutions. He has no doubt: “In the future, we will have to rely on open decision-making processes.”  

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Many small software components add up to a single application: Novel methods aim to simplify the detection of side effects caused by changes

Large-scale software applications that combine all their functions in a single component are becoming less common. Instead, we increasingly see applications that are made up of smaller components called microservices. Researchers involved in a newly launched project are working on improving the detection of undesired side effects caused by changes in individual microservices.

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