Industry 4.0 is still not fully exploited and academic, industry leaders and policy makers are already discussing of Industry 5.0 (e.g. https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/468a892a-5097-11eb-b59f-01aa75ed71a1/) .
In the last decade (i.e. Industry 4.0) the manufacturing has become “smart” through the integration of the IoT, AI, cyber-physical systems, and Cloud. The smartness was provided by connecting machines, intelligent devices, and control systems with the final goal to provide an end-to-end value chains able to be as efficient as possible.
Industry 5.0 (I5.0) complements the existing Industry 4.0 (I4.0) approaches towards a sustainable, human-centric and resilient European industry. In this respect, “Industry 5.0 provides a vison of industry that aims beyond efficiency and productivity as the sole goals, and reinforces the role and the contribution of industry to society. It places the wellbeing of the worker at the centre of the production process and uses new technologies to provide prosperity beyond jobs and growth while respecting the production limits of the planet.” [https://ec.europa.eu/info/research-and-innovation/research-area/industrial-research-and-innovation/industry-50_en]
Bringing back human workers in the loop, Industry 5.0 will pair human and machine to further utilize human brainpower and creativity to increase process efficiency by combining workflows with intelligent systems.
Regardless if it is a real new revolution of the completion of the Industry 4.0 paradigm, there is an actual need of understanding how to make machine and human able to cooperate and the implication of the cooperation especially in terms of trust, explainable systems and technology acceptance. The impact of new approaches and services cannot be only on efficiency. It needs to support wider and more social benefit.
The role of federated platforms like EFPF that put together many stakeholders and end-users and assemble services from different underpinning platforms will become increasingly important and the role of platform operators needs further discussions and investigations. The federation model particularly suits the collaborative organisations and individuals, as it allows them to test and experiment with heterogenous technology solution and assess their readiness and maturity levels in the I5.0 scenarios, and to identify the key requirements for new training programs, skill development models and suitable business cases in various regional, societal and economic domains.
While a number of academic and industrial initiatives are already addressing the Industry 5.0 paradigm, EFPF is actively contributing to it by participating to the European Big Data Value Forum event on “AI and Data Technologies for Industry 5.0: opportunities and future scenarios” (https://european-big-data-value-forum.b2match.io/) and also sponsoring a Workshop on “AI beyond efficiency: Interoperability towards Industry 5.0” at the I-ESA conference.
To find out more about the EFPF project, please explore our website: https://www.efpf.org/