Toward Self-Organizing Production Logistics in Circular Factories: A Multi-Agent Approach
This work addresses production logistics problems for circular factories, but it is incremental as it builds on existing multi-agent and self-organizing logistics concepts without presenting new empirical results.
The paper tackles the challenge of structural uncertainty in production logistics for circular factories by proposing a multi-agent system for decentralized decision-making, aiming to increase responsiveness and resilience to disruptions.
Production logistics in circular factories is characterized by structural uncertainty due to variability in product-core quality, availability, and timing. These conditions challenge conventional deterministic and centrally planned control approaches. This paper proposes a vision for a multi-agent system based on decentralized decision-making through negotiations and event-driven communication serving as an enabler for self-organizing production logistics (SOPL) in circular factories. The envisioned system architecture integrates embodied agents, a shared semantic knowledge layer, and dynamically instantiated digital twins to support monitoring, prediction, and scenario evaluation. By shifting decision-making closer to execution and enabling agents to interpret tasks, assess capabilities, and negotiate responsibilities, the approach is expected to increase responsiveness and improve resilience to disruptions inherent in circular factories. Building on this vision, a three-phase development roadmap is introduced and characterized using the self-organizing logistics (SOL) typology, providing a structured pathway toward the realization of SOPL in circular factories.