Self-organising logistics for circularity: meet XPRES postdoc Jan-Felix Klein
As industries move toward increased circularity and extended producer responsibility, traditional planning and control approaches cannot keep pace. Manufacturers need more adaptive solutions, where autonomous agents across the production system can respond and adapt in real time.
“The primary application area of my research is circular manufacturing. It’s particularly rooted in the idea of a circular factory – a production system that manufactures new products while simultaneously recovering, inspecting, and reusing parts from returned products of previous generations,” says Jan-Felix Klein, new postdoc at XPRES.
Decision-making distributed across multiple autonomous agents – self-organising logistics – is not new. But recent advances in AI-based decision-making and autonomous systems are now bringing it into industrial practice.
“Self-organising logistics can support the transition to higher circularity by enabling factories to operate reliably even when material flows, quality and conditions are uncertain,” says Jan-Felix Klein.
At XPRES, Jan-Felix will focus on developing a multi-agent system in which production logistics resources, such as autonomous mobile robots, picking robots, or storage systems, can dynamically react to disturbances and collaboratively identify and execute feasible solutions.
The research is done in collaboration with the Collaborative Research Center on the Circular Factory at KIT in Germany, and with industrial partners in Sweden as potential piloting sites for the envisioned system.
Read more about the research in the preprint “Toward Self-Organizing Production Logistics in Circular Factories: A Multi-Agent Approach” arxiv.org/abs/2604.04753
Supervisor: Magnus Wiktorsson, co-supervisor Anna Granlund, MDU