The Carl Zeiss Foundation is funding the research project "Ageing Smart - Räume intelligent gestalten" at TU Kaiserslautern (TUK) with around 4.3 million euros. The project addresses the baby boomers born between 1955 and 1969, who are gradually entering retirement age. So, municipalities are required to create age-appropriate residential locations and supply structures. In an integrated approach, the researchers are therefore bringing together for the first time spatial planning, infrastructural and supply-side approaches from the perspective of the "baby boomers" and the municipalities.
The interdisciplinary research project initially focuses on three concise fields of investigation: Residential locations and the associated demands on the residential environment and mobility, behaviour with regard to leisure and recreational activities, and medical care and the associated health infrastructures and services.
The aim is to develop a data-based system that serves public actors as a decision-making aid in their planning processes. In this system, planning and sociological questions are answered using methods of artificial intelligence, software development and mathematical optimisation.
In addition to the working group of Prof. Dr. Annette Spellerberg (Department of Spatial and Environmental Planning), who is leading the consortium as spokesperson, other working groups from the departments of Spatial and Environmental Planning and Computer Science as well as the German Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE) are involved in the project.
The Department of Mathematics is prominently represented by Prof. Dr. Stefan Ruzika as deputy spokesperson of the consortium. Together with his team from the Optimisation group, he is researching solution methods for integrated multicriteria routing and location problems that will be incorporated into the decision support system.
The Carl Zeiss Foundation is funding "Ageing Smart" in its lighthouse programme "Durchbrüche" together with five other interdisciplinary research projects. The project of the optimisation group is embedded in the university potential area "MathApp - Mathematics applied to real-world challenges" of the Research Initiative (FI) of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate.