Artificial Intelligence beyond Efficiency - Report of EFPF Workshop at I-ESA2022

Authors: Stefano Modafferi, Maria José Nuñez, Francesco Lelli, Davide Dalle Carbonare

[University of Southampton, IT Innovation Centre, AIDIMME, Tilburg University, Engineering Ingegneria Informatica Spa]

Industry 5.0 provides a vision of industry that aims beyond efficiency and productivity as the sole goals and reinforces the role and the contribution of industry to society. A workshop by the EFPF project in the I-ESA2022 conference provided an opportunity to discuss the drivers, barriers and implications of leveraging the technological solutions developed in Industry 4.0 as well as their relevant societal impacts in a move towards Industry 5.0.

During the workshop, the invited keynote speaker Alessandro Piscioneri from COMAU explained his experience about evolution of I4.0 towards Industry 5.0, related challenges, and explanation of some industrial examples/use cases COMAU is developing or has already developed.

Following the keynote speech, 11 papers accepted by the workshop organisers were presented by respective authors. These include:

• “Introducing Building Blocks for Industry 4.0, an analytics application for the federated EFPF platform”: This paper presents an application that leverage analytic modules for the manufacturing industry developed as part of the EFPF ecosystem. This approach will allow the use of data analytics and predictive maintenance methodologies for SMEs.

• “AI Ethics for Industry 5.0 – from principles to practice”: this paper discusses the new challenges that Industry 5.0 brings to the way humans are organizing themselves in groups. It also suggests an ethical framework for AI that can enable the creation of a sustainable society from an economical and environmental point of view.

• “A practical experience of AI Solution used to improve varnishing process efficiency in furniture manufacturing”: This paper introduces opportunities and barriers related to the interoperability of systems where AI techniques are applied. It presents a use case for improving the efficiency of a varnishing process for flat parts in the furniture manufacturing sector. Finding includes the fact that the installation of sensors must be planned with the target company involving decision makers from innovation, production, and maintenance. In addition, we need to avoid situations where the maintenance personnel remove these sensors due to difficulties in opening the machine to perform some routine operation or repair.

• “Industry 5.0 and Sociotechnical Theory: theoretical underpinnings”: This paper discussed why the Sociotechnical Theory should not be neglected in addressing I5.0. It presents a framework of reference for manufacturers looking to implement I5.0. In particular, it highlights the interdependencies between people and technologies and how the EC should apply it to I5.0 driving towards human-centric, resilient, and sustainable manufacturing.

• “Relevance of Visualization and Interaction technologies for Industry 5.0”: it investigate bidirectional communication channels between humans and machines as key aspects for generating collaborators instead of competitors. This approach strength the human role of Industry 5.0 in manufacturing environt.

• “Teaming.AI: Enabling Human-AI Teaming Intelligence in Manufacturing”: it presents a teaming framework that structures the interactions between humans and AI systems to overcome the lack of flexibility as a limiting factor of human-centered AI collaboration. It also outline the need of a balance between the practical and the academic work.

• “On Exploring the Possibilities and the Limits of AI for an Interoperable and Empowering Industry 4.0”: This paper proposes to raise awareness on certain interoperability issues shaping industry 5.0 to enable a human-centric resilient society. It presents a case study where machine intelligence perform better then human intelligence and investigate the minimum amount of data that are needed for implementing such solutions.

• “Artificial Intelligence from Industry 5.0 perspective. Is the technology ready to meet the challenge?”: Authors introduce the underpinning technologies that Industry 5.0 will require. In particular they propose the emerging concept of augmented intelligence as the key technology to transition Industry 4.0 to the fifth industrial revolution.

• “Towards Zero-Defect Manufacturing: Machine Selection through Unsupervised Learning in the Printing Industry”: This paper addresses Zero Defect Manufacturing as one of the key concepts of Industry 4.0. This approach is critical in the offset printing industry as a specific example to reduce the printing defects.

• “Towards Industry 5.0 – A Trustworthy AI Framework for Digital Manufacturing with Humans in Control”: This paper presents a digital manufacturing platform architecture that extends Industry 4.0 paradigms as the next ‘revolution’ in industrial domain characterized by three main elements, human-centricity, sustainability, and resilience – as desired in Industry5.0.

• “On Developing Human Centric Digital Tweens”. This paper present how humans use smart devices for addressing several different needs. It focusses on the needs of been connected and advocate that such need is present in every human machine interaction and industry 5.0 is not an exception.

The workshop concluded with an open discussion on the topic raised by the above presentations. The participants agreed that industry 5.0 is a nice and catchy name for what is the facto an evolution (and not a revolution) of I4.0. Some of the key point that have been discussed included:

• Industrial companies when investing in technological solutions are naturally interested in supporting solutions that offer a clear investment path. However, it is necessary to keep workers in the loop in order to avoid any resistance to change or impeding concerns of “being replaced by machines” or monitored.

• For I5.0 to be effective, we should avoid separating the technological aspects from the social implications. In other words, a narrow focus on technological innovation to improve productivity and increase financial returns fails to adequately account for the wider contexts within which manufacturers (and all businesses) are embedded. Using Prosperity as a measure of success rather than RoI provides a more accurate basis on which to make business decisions.

• New technology solutions should also be analysed from the point of view of how the proposed developments impact or affect the humans in the loop.

As a concluding remark the participants agreed that for the future development of industry 4.0 towards I5.0 industry, academia and society in general should pay more attention to humans when addressing the future generation of solutions in the manufacturing domain