Simulation")?> Due to the technical progress in the 20th century we are facing both an enormous rise of technical means and equipment and also a world around us that makes greater demands with its still growing complexity. Most of the known methods fail to answer the questions that arise from the new situation. The increasing individual mobility for instance can be welcomed with regard to quality of life and new business markets, but poses new challenges by the upcoming strain on our traditionally grown traffic network, the danger of car accidents and the ecological damage. The fact that the number of casualties in car accidents has drastically decreased within the past years in Germany can be seen as an argument that efficient technical control may help to manage these problems.

One problem of the analysis is the complexity of the involved structures, partly because of their mere size, partly because of a lack of insight into the implied network of causes and effects. Most of the important questions can not be answered by induction but have to rely on tests.

To reduce the number of single tests on a large number of items one may try to define prototypes for a generalized analysis, see our project of Pooling Design.

To avoid physical tests simulation models can be applied that try to reflect one part of the area of interest exactly. In a lot of areas this has become possible only recently since the developed computers are now able to produce virtual, "almost real" realities. Mathematics and natural sciences are thus faced with the principal task of testing the computability of the phenomena, to build models and to provide algorithms that are suitable for the available hardware components. Therefore the development of simulation techniques is strongly tied to the technical means. In high performance computers the limits of technical feasibility are expanded continually whereas parallelizing computing processes is one of the traditional fields of work in our institute in this direction.

Our Workstation Cluster allows us to even simulate highly complex models. One of our most important studies at the moment is the investigation of traffic equilibria in a traffic micro simulation that is supported by an interdisciplinary research fund of the the land North-Rhine-Westphalia. In model simulations of traffic flow in and around the town Wuppertal we developed new methods for the evaluation of traffic planning and control.

In another project we cooperate with German building and loan associations (check here the idea of this German form of saving). The simulation models of collectives of savers allow improved contract conditions and a more efficient protection of the saving amounts as well as better marketing strategies. Our latest investigations of cluster analysis will help to combine the advantages of the simulation with the definition of new prototype groups of savers.