Berenike Masing successfully defended her PhD thesis on “Enriched Periodic Timetabling” at the Institute of Mathematics at Freie Universität Berlin on April 29, 2026. The thesis makes substantial progress on the topic of periodic timetabling in public transit with the periodic event scheduling problem (PESP) as its central mathematical framework. It strengthens the theoretical foundations of PESP, improves the computational performance of this model, and enhances its modeling scope and practical applicability by including aspects of passenger routing and infrastructure allocation. In particular, re-timetabling problems related to construction sites at the S-Bahn Berlin can be solved by an ingenious extension of the model to include track choice constraints, often recovering most of the services. The research was supported by the Berlin Math+ Center of Excellence and the MobilityLab of the Research Campus MODAL.
The photo shows (from left to right) Ralf Borndörfer (promoter and committee head), Benedikt Weygandt (postdoc committee member), Philine Schiewe (external committee member), Berenike Masing, and Christian Haase (executive director of the Insitute of Mathematics and committee member).
