On May 7, 2026, Nils Jörgensen successfully defended his PhD thesis “Joint Communication and Mission Planning: The Real-world Challenges of Factory 5G“, on how 5G and 6G networks can enable wireless coordination of autonomous mobile robots in smart factories.
The thesis shows that the research field rests on assumptions that do not hold up in industrial reality — algorithms typically optimise for signal strength, while data rates in modern cellular systems are governed by other factors such as MIMO stream configuration. As a constructive contribution, the thesis presents a PDDL-based planning framework that treats 5G resource blocks as explicit decision variables alongside mission planning, halving the spectrum demand, and an empirical measurement study showing that Gaussian process regression can cut data-rate prediction errors by two thirds. Realising the smart factory, the thesis concludes, requires reorientation — from motion to mission planning, from signal strength to network-service abstractions, and from simulation-based to measurement-based validation.
We congratulate Nils for the PhD degree and thank him for a very interesting defence seminar!
