DECIDE

Scope and objectives

Minimizing the climate and environmental impact of the road transport industry across its entire life cycle is essential to maintaining Sweden’s global competitiveness. However, achieving fossil-free road transport and circular value chains remains constrained by a key gap: the lack of cost-effective flexibility in internal logistics. Current systems are designed for stable, high-volume, linear production and economies of scale, making them rigid and difficult to reconfigure under variability in product mix, volume, and circular flows. DECIDE addresses this gap by introducing a new design logic in which configurability, decision responsiveness, and lifecycle traceability become primary design criteria for internal logistics in mixed production of combustion (ICE) and electric vehicles (EV) and circular production with remanufactured cores.

The project is scoped around the production system – Climate-neutral manufacturing, maintenance and decommissioning. The purpose of the project is to develop and demonstrate a new design logic for digital and flexible internal logistics, enabling cost-effective handling of highly variable forward and remanufacturing flows without compromising operational performance. The project applies a system-level perspective and investigates two research questions: 1) How digital and flexible internal logistics can enable high-variability forward and reverse flows in fossil-free and circular value chains? 2) Under which technological, organizational, and operational conditions flexible logistics principles should replace scale-optimized systems?

The aim of the project is threefold: to enable high variability of forward and circular production flows, enable industrial transition within existing production systems, and redefine the design logic of internal logistics systems for mixed and circular production. Validation is achieved through a system-level demonstrator implemented as a Learning Factory, combining physical experiments with virtual ones to evaluate new ways of implementing flexible internal logistics and control strategies under realistic conditions of existing factories. Performance will be assessed through KPIs addressing resilience, economic performance, resource efficiency, and greenhouse gas emissions.

Project Facts

Funding program

Vinnova – FFI Circularity Spring 2026

Project partners

• KTH Royal Institute of Technol​​​​​​​ogy ​​​​​​​
• Autocirc Scandinavian Powertrain AB ​​​​​​​
• Nida Tech Sweden AB ​​​​​​​
• RISE Research Institutes of Sweden AB ​​​​​​​
• Södertälje Science Park AB ​​​​​​​
• Virtual Manufacturing Sweden AB ​​​​​​​
• Volvo Construction Equipment AB ​​​​​​​

Duration

Project start: 2026-06-01

Project end: 2030-05-31

Budget

• Vinnova financing: 8,7 Msek

• KTH 4,2 Msek

Contact

Principal investigator and operative manager for DECIDE