New at UDE: Katharina Glock
Logistics for all our Lives
- von Dr. Alexandra Nießen
- 23.04.2026
If essential supplies are missing in hospitals or emergency response services, it can cost lives. Well-functioning logistics systems can help ensure that products are in the right place at the right time. Prof. Dr. Katharina Glock wants to improve the technology behind this. She has accepted the professorship for “Technical Logistics” at the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Duisburg-Essen.
Logistical processes – in other words, all the steps and means used to move things from A to B – are changing with technological progress. “Logistics systems are becoming more and more connected and automated,” says Prof. Dr. Katharina Glock. “This increases the demands on them significantly. We need to make them more powerful and more sustainable.”
At the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE), Professor Glock aims to redesign logistics systems. “My vision is to create intelligent logistics systems that can adapt their decisions independently to real-world situations. They should also remain functional when problems occur,” she explains. If they can configure themselves without human help, this increases the systems’ resilience and efficiency.
Prof. Dr. Katharina Glock will develop new computational mathematical models for logistics processes. “We will combine models, algorithms, and simulations of logistics movements in a way that optimizes the overall process. We first test with simulations how well the processes work in reality and improve them if necessary,” says the engineer. Her work is already being used in many projects and collaborations with industry and the healthcare sector.
Katharina Glock studied industrial engineering with distinction (2009-2015) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and also earned a Diplôme (2013-2014) from the Institut polytechnique de Grenoble in France. In 2015, she researched modeling of vehicle routing problems at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and in 2016 she moved to the FZI Research Center for Information Technology in Karlsruhe, where she worked in various departments until her appointment at UDE.
Further information:
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Katharina Glock, Transportsysteme und -logistik, katharina.glock@uni-duisburg-essen.de
Editor: Dr. Alexandra Nießen, alexandra.niessen@uni-due.de