Anexia is a hosting and software development company founded 15 years ago by Alexander Windbichler, now 35, with a focus on cloud services. Anexia, with headquarters in Vienna and Klagenfurt, currently employs around 300 people in more than ten offices in Europe and the USA, operates over 90 server and data centers in more than 70 countries and serves around 100,000 active customers.
The complexity of the system "railway" has risen sharply in recent decades and today even the best planners can no longer control it in its entirety. In some areas, good planning and decisions depend on many years of experience of individual employees, which is why the upcoming generation change threatens to result in a significant loss of know-how. Furthermore, ÖBB is confronted with increasing market and customer requirements in terms of performance (stability & punctuality) and price (efficient use of resources).
The ÖBB-wide "Automated Resource Planning (ARP)" program launched in 2019 aims to exploit these optimization potentials for both freight and passenger transport and thus increase the attractiveness of rail as a transport medium. Furthermore, the shift of traffic from road to rail should be supported and the ecological footprint reduced. In the next few years, the ARP program will gradually transform the largely sequential and partly manual logistics and personnel planning into integrated and automated planning.
A core aspect of the ARP program is close cooperation with universities and research-related companies in the areas of simulation and optimization. The cooperation with Anexia, which has been in place since 2017, focuses in particular on improvements in the efficiency of logistics processes through planning support and optimization using intelligent algorithms. The development of prototypical algorithms to support planners in empty wagon dispatching in WP 4 "Network optimization" complements the previous funding and implementation projects in the areas of traction unit and driver planning.