Welcome to the Chair of Technology and Innovation Management

About the Tool

The tools provided on this page came into beeing in relation to our research and teaching activities. They are open to the academic public as well as interested practitioners.

The online Operations Research tool has been created primarily to give students a training platform when studying linear programming and preparing for exams. Some features, however, are only available to logged-in users.

The tool relating to Rubik's Cube is some sort of an academic accident. In the winter semester 2020/21, I taught a class on web technologies. Within this class, students were required to implement a simple website as a term project. Topics included e.g. a shopping cart for an online dealer and a Sudoku game. The Rubik's Cube tool was supposed to serve as an example. Moreover, I expected the task of finding the shortest path to solve the cube to be sufficiently complex so that a PHP script would need some observable time computing the solution. I wanted to show that the same algorithm would run much faster when implemented in a compiled language such as C. To my surprise, however, the task is quite easy. A simple implementation in PHP (running single-threaded on a standard NAS) is so fast that computing time is unobservable. Thus, in this respect, I failed on my original didactic objective. (Maybe, an extension to Rubik's 3x3x3 cube would serve this goal?) So, let's consider it just a fun tool.

We do not store any personal data. However, we do reserve the right to possibly record computation times of particular tasks which we may use to improve the software. And we do not take any responsibility that user activity will not leave digital traces. In particular, the system maintains log files that are standard on a Linux/Apache/PHP or Synology NAS installation (e.g. regarding web server access and system messages/failures).

Interested students are invited to contribute further tools.

Please provide comments and report errors to Stefan Seifert.