Ludger D. Sax

Ludger Daniel Sax is the owner and Managing Director of the Grid Optimization Europe Ltd., based in Germany & Luxembourg. He studied mathematics, philosophy and theology at the University of Bochum, Germany. He studied Strategy & Economics i.a. at IMD Business School (Lausanne/Switzerland) and USW Schloß Gracht (Erftstadt/Germany). His particular interest has always been the science, building a bridge between science/theory and industry/praxis. He has achieved success in the past 30 years in leading positions in the gas & water industry in Europe, in particular for Ruhrgas, E.ON and Open Grid Europe. Among his significant achievements is the initiation of one of the largest research alliance in Europe in 2008. This research alliance named “ForNe” aims to collaborate in network optimization. Around 10 universities and institutes with more than 30 mathematicians along with more than 10 employees from the gas industry worked together to make use of contemporary mathematics and state-of-the-art solver technology to establish modern mathematical methods in the planning of gas transport networks. ForNe/”Evaluating Gas Network Capacities” got the “EURO Excellence in Practice Award 2016”. Other projects in which he has been active in include the (D)GOR (Gesellschaft für Operations Research) working group “prediction methods” and the BMBF (German Federal Ministry for Research and Education) led working group “strategy mathematics 2020”. His latest research project which he initialized in 2014 is the optimization of the control/dispatching of gas grids. He is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Zuse Institute Berlin (ZIB). Since the end of 2013 he has been with his company Grid Optimization Europe and is currently working on a self-developed program “OptiPlan/Russian Version”, to optimize the gas grids of Russian regional municipalities and distribution system operators; the program went in production in Odinzovo/Moscow in 2017. He was one of 24 invited speakers of the International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics ICIAM 2015 in Beijing. Furthermore he is currently working together with the Russian Embassy of Luxembourg and the Luxembourg Economy, in order to save the economic relations between the EU and Russia during the Ukraine crisis.