About the Institute

How it all began . . .

The appointment of a chair of business administration and information systems in 1972 marked the beginnings of information systems as a field of teaching and research at Universität Hamburg. For well over five years—long before the informatics degree program was inaugurated—the subsequent chair held numerous lectures open to auditors from all faculties which were designated as belonging to the field of "business data processing." A later research project in the field headed up by Universität Hamburg and approved by the German Research Foundation for all then existing chairs provided a binding definition and epistemological basis for the discipline of information systems. This is how information systems emerged as a discipline in Germany and other German-speaking European countries.

Due to the broad range of classes and research activities, the Institute of Information Systems (Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik, IWI) was founded at Universität Hamburg in the 1980s. A remarkable level of funding during the 1990s meant that the Institute became one of the largest and most important specialist academic institutes in Germany, with more than ten permament positions and three secretarial offices devoted to teaching, research, and networking with other academic institutions in Hamburg. The Institute found notable partners for a variety of projects in companies such as Bayer, Talkline, and Telekom.

Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. Dieter B. Preßmar, the first chair of the Institute, contributed greatly to these successes.

His successor, Prof. Dr. Stefan Voß, assumed office in 2002.

The Institute today . . .

Analyzing information and communication systems in their various applications and economic sectors is the Institute's main area of activity today, in particular in the following areas:

 

• supply chain management, especially green supply chain planning (optimization of tactical supply chain planning based on mutation selection processes) and empirical analyses of the level of implementation of sustainable supply chain management.
• quantitative methods for decision-making processes within application areas such as production and logistics (especially port and maritime logistics) as well as project management and telecommunications (planning network structures and routing within SDH-/WDM-nets as well as algorithms for multicast-routing).
• business intelligence and data mining, especially applications in soft-computing methods (artificial neuronal networks, support vector machines, etc.) by solving business-administrative problems in marketing, production, and disposition.

Several hundred publications in renowned journals and edited publications as well as numerous honors, mentions, and high rankings emphasize the quality of our research.

In addition to this, our main focus is developing new, application-oriented interdisciplinary research topics such as computational logistics, cloud computing or matheuristics. This is supported by various activities, for instance the organization of international conferences, for example the Metaheuristics International Conference 2009 (MIC 09), the International Network Optimization Conference 2011 (INOC 2011), or the Global Port Research Alliance Conference in 2016.

An ongoing partner-in-practice of our Institute is the SimPlan AG, whose specific, problem-adapted simulation models and solutions are deeply involved in our research activities.

In several externally funded projects with industrial partners such as Telekom, HHLA, BASF, or EADS, we test and evaluate research results.

With the Institute of Information Systems Universität Hamburg affirms its reputation as a significant academic institution on a national and international level.