On December 7, 2023 Lucas Kletzander was honored for his outstanding achievements in school and university as part of the Sub Auspiciis Promotions, among seven TU Wien graduates. Federal President Dr. Alexander Van der Bellen awarded him the Ring of Honor of the Republic of Austria.

Lucas Kletzander completed his informatics degree at TU Wien in 2022. Since 2017, he has been working as a project assistant at the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence and Optimization in Planning and Scheduling. He finished his doctoral thesis sub auspiciis praesidentis at the Institute for Logic and Computation at TU Wien Informatics, supervised by Nysret Musliu. He is now a PostDoc Researcher at the Research Unit for Database and Artificial Intelligence. Lucas Kletzander also won the TU Wien Ressel Award 2023 for his outstanding dissertation.

Kletzander’s thesis deals with personnel scheduling. Different demand structures must be covered, while many rules from laws, collective agreements, and work agreements must be considered. The aim of Kletzander’s work is not only an efficient plan but also the consideration of ergonomic factors and employee health and satisfaction. In his dissertation, he dealt with several complex personnel planning problems of this kind. He developed specialized methods for individual issues and generally applicable solution methods that can be easily transferred to different situations. Using reinforcement learning, small algorithmic building blocks can be automatically assembled into a suitable solution method that delivers high-quality results for various applications.

“I am delighted and proud to have achieved this honor because it is a crowning achievement for my entire time at school and university. I am grateful to all the people who have accompanied and motivated me: my parents, family members and friends, teachers and professors, colleagues, and my doctoral supervisor. I like the shared pursuit of science knowledge and see this award as an incentive to continue to do my best and advance the state of the art in a responsible way that benefits the people affected,” says Kletzander.