The region of Thessaly occupies the central-eastern part of continental Greece and is comprised of four prefectures: Karditsa, Larisa, Magnesia and Trikala. It has a total area of 14,000 square kilometres which is roughly 10.6% of the area of the entire country. It borders on the north with the districts of West and Central Macedonia, on the south with the region of Sterea Hellas, on the west with the Ipiros district and on the east with the Aegean Sea. According to the census conducted by ESYE in 2001, the population of the region of Thessaly is about 750,000 and represents 6.9% of the total population of the country. It has noted a 1.5% increase in the population since 1991 and remains the third largest region in the country. Volos which is the capital of Magnesia and the main port of the prefecture is a vibrant intermodal node with major industrial activities and home to the University of Thessaly.
The University of Thessaly was founded in 1984 and start operating in 1988 consists of three departments. Nowadays, the University of Thessaly consists of fifteen undergraduate departments which are spead over four towns in the area of Thessaly, namely Volos, Larissa, Karditsa, and Trikala, three postgraduate programs and three elective studies programs. Its students have overcome the number of 5000. Its academic physiognomy was designed in that way that it can respond to an integrated University in the region, which has as a target to represent the go-between attraction pole between Athens and Thessaloniki.
The Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Thessaly is a rapidly growing Department with state-of-the-art educational and reseach activities. The Department received its first students in 1990, and awarded its first diplomas in 1995. The Department is part of the Engineering School of the University of Thessaly along with four other Departments and it is located in modern facilities in the area of Pedion Areos in Volos.
The Systems Optimization Laboratory was first established as a Scientific Computing Laboratory in 1998 and is now renamed to its current name. The Laboratory's mission is to facilitate high quality original research on optimization methods for complex industrial, logistics, service and transportation systems. In addition, the Laboratory offers consulting and development services to Industry and Governments on complex systems modelling, optimization, problem solving and analyses. Some of the activities include fundamental research on algorithms for linear, nonlinear and network problems, efficient implementations, and applications research in diverse areas, such as planning, scheduling and control of industries, design and operation of production lines, vehicle routing and scheduling in transportation, optimal design of communication systems, emergency response management and portfolio optimization. We aim to become the premier University based research laboratory in Greece and a major research entity in Europe.
The main research activities of the SOL are: Stochastic Optimization Methods, Online and Robust Routing and Scheduling, Assignment Methods (Online and Offline), Scheduling, Equilibrium Modeling, Knapsack Algorithms.
Optimization of transportation of logistic systems. The development of innovative demand responsive transport systems would be useful for the better connection of remote rural villages. We are interested in potential innovative paratransit demand responsive systems applied in other EU-cities to serve remote villages such as the villages of Mt. Pelion or Kapodistrian villages such as Phillipi.
