Learning Factories towards Industry 5.0: Evolutionary or Revolutionary?

Abstract

Rather than representing a technological leap forward, Industry 5.0 actually nests the Industry 4.0 approach in a broader context, providing regenerative purpose and directionality to the technological transformation of industrial production for people-planet-prosperity [1]. Consequently, Industry 5.0 can be considered as the new engine of the economic and societal transition with a societal concept which can mean more distributed well-being with human-centric and sustainable, resilient industry. The advantage of the learning factory concept therefore lies in the combination of the realistic factory environment, processes and transparency of the structured activities which can provide testing of new features, modules, functionalities, tools, and technologies based on the existing Industry 4.0 framework. Especially, the concepts of implementing new business models with benchmarking emphasise the major difference in achievable results. Transition to a circular economy can only be achieved if up-skilling and re-skilling of workers can also be done which is the core function of the learning factory.