Once again TU Dortmund achieved a success in raising third-party funds. The German Research Association (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG) gave its final OK to the new collaborative research center (Sonderforschungsbereich SFB) “Non-Linear Dynamic Models in Economics and Technology”. At TU Dortmund 13 senior and 17 junior researchers are participating. Partner of TU Dortmund is Ruhr-Universität Bochum where four chairs and one group of junior scientists are taking part. Initially DFG will fund the large research project for four years with an annual amount of 1.9 million Euros.
The research center focuses on time-dynamic processes in economics and engineering sciences. Statistical models in these fields face complex processes with partially insurmountable dependencies. In the current financial crisis, for example, almost all economic models have failed due to changes in the dependency structure of financial assets. Why do international capital market dependencies drastically increase during an economic downturn. To find and quantify such abrupt and/or gradual changes is one of the most important goals of the new SFB.
Similar problems also exist in engineering. With regard to metal forming or concrete processing, for example, it is important to take account of the fact that structural breaks occur and have to be considered in statistic modeling.
On the part of Dortmund there are five senior researchers from statistics, four from economics and social sciences, three from mechanical engineering and one from physics involved. On the part of Bochum scientists from the faculties of mathematics, economics and electrical engineering and information technology are participating in 12 projects of the SFB.
With five collaborating chairs Dortmund’s statistics bears the brunt of the collaborative research center. After successfully completing the SFB 475 “Reduction of Complexity in Multivariate Data Structures” they managed to acquire yet another collaborative research center for TU Dortmund. “I hope that the new SFB helps to make the interdisciplinary and stimulating cooperation of statistics with all research fields even more fruitful for TU Dortmund”, states SFB-speaker Walter Krämer, professor for business and social statistics at TU Dortmund.