A Ride through Flix’ Optimization Universes

Speakers: Sander Van Aken & Myriam Thömmes (Flix SE)

Flix has rapidly become a global player in the long-distance passenger transportation market, operating in 44 different countries across 4 continents with brands as FlixBus, FlixTrain, Greyhound (US) and Kamil Koc (Turkey). Being a travel-tech company at heart, we harness the power of ML and OR to tackle the most complex business challenges. In this talk, we will first give a brief overview of the business problems we are addressing with ML and OR solutions. We’ll then deep dive into one specific network planning use case to showcase how we deal with the real-world complexity of our global business model, and how we turn this into our advantage to deliver pragmatic OR solutions. Beyond the methodological part, we illustrate how approaching OR product development as a multi-disciplinary collaboration forms a key ingredient to succes­s. Finally, we give some insight how we continuously iterate on both problem and solution space to deliver actual business value.