1 Industry 4.0 today, Industry 5.0 tomorrow

Abstract

This chapter discusses the transition from the realities of Industry 4.0 to the vision for Industry 5.0. This transition is themed by collaboration between humans and machines. Industry 4.0 paved the way for the techno-driven futuristic vision that humans have harboured for decades but had only been the subject of our stories of science fiction and alien planets. Today 4.0 has revolutionized scalability, volume, connectivity and control in manufacturing but alongside has also sparked a sense of apprehension in machine-to machine communication, loss of jobs and security concerns of machine takeover. To leverage these advantages and outweigh the risks, Industry 5.0 is expected to lead the way. The chapter explores this transition and collaboration between humans and machines from two perspectives: Operational and Human Relations. Restructuring of today's industry will be aimed at resource utilization, cost optimization, authority and control of one over the other, skill and capabilities development and many such facets which will help create a meaningful future for tomorrow's new age manufacturing era.

1.1 Introduction

Each Industrial Revolution since the 1800s has been a transformation bringing new technologies and bridging the gap between reality and human imagination. While the Industrial Revolution 1.0 and 2.0 focused on an "Inventive approach", and gifted us inventions from steam engines to machine tools, printing press, telegraphs and water supply to assembly lines; the third and fourth Industrial Revolutions essentially focused on a "Disruptive approach" through digital disruption for improving how we do things- faster, dynamic and evolutionary. Faster communication, quicker supply chains, stronger transportation, robotic automations supported by computational power and machine programming. Figure 1.1 shows the adoption in various industrial revolutions.

Figure 1.1: Adaption in various industrial revolutions.

The first Industrial Revolution essentially introduced mass production and increased productivity for Europe and more so for Great Britain. The Second though started in the United States of America but soon enveloped all major developed countries and laid the foundation of a global economy. The third industrial revolution brought speed into the global system through disruptive digital transformation- computers, the internet and networks.

All these three revolutions needed strong human intervention for inventive industrial approaches to be implemented or for social and digital network effects to be created and therefore had a high human interaction interface in every system design. In fact, the third industrial revolution essentially commercialized the people-driven services sector and digital economy. However, the Fourth revolution essentially helps to create a high-speed systems environment reducing human intervention to "minimum viability" and increasing automation to "maximum viability" such as to balance optimum output and efficiency.

The Fourth Revolution therefore is rightly the most futuristic and forecast driven and allows machines to work in new, collaborative and highly productive ways with minimum human intervention [2]. This is the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) with smart machines, sensors with interconnected networks so machines can interact with each other, diagnose their own problems, alert master machines, implement course correction intervention and all this while ensuring optimum resource allocation and time utility. And not just within a single factory set-up but across different industrial set-ups.

1.2 The industry 4.0 vision

Industry 4.0 [3] or the Fourth Industrial Revolution set in to bring to life the vision of a hyper- interconnected industrial environment paving the way for smart and autonomous industrial systems fueled by machine learning, data and Internet of Things (IoT). The vision that is shaping up today, evolved from a German initiative around 2014 called "Industrie 4.0", aimed to make German manufacturing more competitive on the world platform. Industrie 4.0, still in-effect, is a collaborative effort of various industries including BMW and Audi with the German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs, Education and Research. Industrie 4.0 clearly stressed that the harbinger of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is not computers or devices but the "Internet". By 2014 41% Germany industries were aware of the term Industry 4.0, its implications and were already assessing their readiness for concrete, groundbreaking initiatives and implementation [1]. But this was only limited to the larger corporate structured companies and the small and medium industries were slowly getting acquainted with the implications of machine-to-machine communication coordinating independently running production processes.

A similar vision started arising globally and intelligent factory set-ups started mushrooming where machines, raw materials, products and systems started communicating with each other with the aim of highly flexible, individualized and resource-friendly mass production. The vision is to have - "Self-contained inter-connected industrial systems" commonly referred to as the Cyber physical systems today.

1.3 Industry 4.0 pillars

There are some key technologies which are the building blocks and pillars for a full-fledged Industrial Revolution 4.0 at mass-operational scale. The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) has identified Industry 4.0's nine technological pillars:

• - Autonomous robots. Robots have long been used in manufacturing floors of assembly plants in automobiles, arc welding and allied industries to take on repetitive tasks for capacity and workflow enhancement. "Unimate"- the first ever industrial robot joined the industrial workforce in 1961 at the assembly line at the General Motors plant in New Jersey and was tasked with releasing scalding-hot vehicular door handles into cooling liquid on a production line for moving them to workers for final finishing and buffing. The International Federation of Robotics in their 2019 Annual Report released that 1.3 million plus industrial robots are actively working in industrial units.

  • Industry 4.0 [8, 9] heralds the era of new-age robotics: autonomous with decision making capabilities powered by machine-learning and artificial intelligence. They have the capability to tackle long complex tasks without any human recourse or intervention. These autonomous robots are capable of a much wider range of services, are more flexible, agile, cooperative with other robots and one of the fastest growing learners on the planet.

• - Simulation: Simulation in industrial set-ups typically refers to imitating a real-world process or design allowing experts to study the process within a highly controlled, repeatable environment. Product development, testing, manufacturing process, exploratory modelling optimization- things which took many man hours and crucial project time before the speed-to-market phase will now be a more smart and optimized machine decision. Machines will pre-empt with predictive statistics and display designs and settings for the next product even before production starts, thereby identifying bottlenecks and improving speed and quality. Siemens is leading intuitive, context-sensitive simulation systems for industrial plants with its new age Tecnomatix Plant Simulation Systems enabling companies to create well-structured, hierarchical models of production facilities, lines and processes integrated with Microsoft Windows protocols for creating a constantly on-environment.

• - Vertical and horizontal system integration: BCG explores two key integrations in the industry 4.0 model. The first is vertical integration whereby all the systems within a manufacturing unit set-up are inter-connected: from field to control to production level as well as the top to bottom enterprise planning level, creating an interoperable 'systems of systems' approach.

  • The second is horizontal integration which is not limited to in-factory set-up as in vertical integration but integrates end-to-end value chain: from supplier to customer inclusive of every interim process - information flows, product development, storage, logistics and distribution.

• - Industrial Internet o Things...