Horizon Europe MSCA-SE funding awarded to the (C)ombinatorial (O)ptimisation for (V)ersatile Applications to (E)merging u(R)ban problems (COVER) project.

Our faculty member Prof. Tınaz Ekim is one of the beneficiaries of the (C)ombinatorial (O)ptimisation for (V)ersatile Applications to (E)merging u(R)ban problems (COVER) project that has been awarded The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action MSCA-SE by the European Commission.

This 3-years interdisciplinary project is coordinated by GTU and includes 15 institutions and 48 researchers from 6 countries. The COVER consortium will address the concept of the “15-minute city”, an urban planning strategy that aims to ensure that the most basic services and daily needs can be conveniently accessed from anywhere within the city in no more than 15 minutes; post-disaster management problems such as emergency response and rescue operations and optimal evacuation strategies for disaster-prone areas such as floods and earthquakes; the research problems that aim to determine the optimal placement of facilities such as factories/warehouses/schools/hospitals/shelters based on geographic demands, facility costs and transportation distances; and traffic management problems, which are vital for sustainable urban life.    

This consortium aims to create a platform of experts from complementary branches of combinatorial optimization such as integer programming, structural graph theory, operations research and network optimization, complemented by local governments that solve the problems of local communities on a daily basis and IT companies that often use combinatorial optimization methods in their solutions. Thus, the scientific work in the COVER consortium will bridge the gap between theory and practice in terms of urbanization problems.

The activities, workshops, trainings and seminar series to be organized within the scope of this project are open to non-consortium participants and aim to bring together different sectors and disciplines. Collaboration with local authorities in the region is also planned throughout the project.