The Meta Holonic Management Tree: review, steps, and roadmap to industrial Cybernetics 5.0

Abstract

Industry 4.0 and 5.0 are currently pushing towards a reconciliation between humans and the concurrent evolution of cyber-physical systems of systems. This constitutes an increasingly complex battlefield in which management and engineering are experiencing hard times. The cybernetics framework, in its recent evolutions, should be refocused to recover a unifying edifice to these challenges. The Cybernetics 5.0, here proposed, aims at finding ways to deal with the complexity of control and management of pervasive networks of digital, analog, mechanic, and human-centered systems. These challenges had always been the basis of cybernetics, but they have been overshadowed by the impressive and exponentially fast advances in information and communication technologies, intelligent automation, and artificial intelligence. However, cybernetics is still crucial when engineering solutions need to move beyond the frontiers of the hard sciences for soft problems, and towards increased interdisciplinarity for hard problems. In this context, holonic architectures are seen as a valuable ground. Hence, holonic foundations are here perfected for the Cybernetics 5.0 vision. The Meta Holonic Management Tree is accordingly proposed as a first methodological instance and factual bridge between cybernetics and the complexities of Industry 4.0 and 5.0.