BMS PhD student Srinwanti Debgupta (TU Berlin) has received an Honorable Mention in the ForveG Research Award for her outstanding Master’s thesis, “Unsplittable Transshipments.” The independent jury recognized her innovative work on optimizing the transport of indivisible goods along fixed routes—a critical challenge in wholesale logistics. Her thesis addresses a key issue for wholesale companies, which often handle highly specialized and logistically complex goods. By developing an algorithm that mathematically minimizes transport costs, her work offers practical solutions to improve efficiency and reduce operational expenses.

ForveG (Forschungsvereinigung Großhandel e.V.) is dedicated to fostering outstanding early-career researchers and promoting applied research by emerging scholars. In 2025, the organization introduced a new award to encourage research projects that provide significant insights into the understanding and advancement of wholesale trade and its economic functions.


Srinwanti Debgupta completed her Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics at St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi (India), before earning her Master’s degree in Mathematics from TU Berlin as a BMS Phase I scholarship recipient in 2024.


Her Master’s thesis, “Unsplittable Transshipments,” introduces a variant of unsplittable flows that seeks a feasible transshipment where the flow from any source to any sink is routed along at most one path. It generalizes the seminal work of Dinitz, Garg, and Goemans on single-source unsplittable flows and provides a provably minimal congestion guarantee equal to the maximum sink demand. Unsplittable transshipments more faithfully model the realities of wholesale logistics than traditional flow models, making this project particularly valuable for capacity-aware planning in the wholesale logistics sector.

Her current doctoral research for the MATH+ project “Unsplittable Flows” (MATH+ Research Area AA3), conducted in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Martin Skutella and Dr. Sarah Morell, extends this work to questions of maximum routable demand and the number of rounds required. Future directions include identifying potential connections to discrepancy theory, developing a bicriteria approximation algorithm for the minimum-cost version, and studying the k-splittable variant of the problem.

“It is a privilege to provide such an ambitious early-career researcher with the chance to present her research results,” says Michael Nitsche, Managing Director of ForveG. “We are particularly pleased that Ms. Debgupta has decided to continue her work on wholesale-related topics as part of her PhD at MATH+ The Berlin Mathematics Research Center. As a member of a larger research team, she will continue working on optimizing wholesale logistics. This is precisely the kind of research that will help the wholesale sector sustainably improve its processes and advance technology.”

As part of ForveG’s commitment to promoting research in logistics, Srinwanti Debgupta will present her findings and their implications for wholesale in an upcoming webinar. The event is open to all. 

• Webinar by Srinwanti Debgupta: One Route Per Shipment: Capacity-Aware Planning for Wholesale Logistics
• Date: 16 October 
• Time: 1:00 to 2:00 PM
• Registration: https://eveeno.com/132915738