European Union Conceptualisation of Industry 5.0: Opportunities and Challenges for Transdisciplinary Engineering

Abstract

‘Industry 5.0' has been used as a term to describe alternative visions of the future of industry. Recently, a European Union Research and Innovation Policy Brief used the label Industry 5.0 to define a vision which is not driven by a new technology, but by a changed perception of value founded on human-centricity, sustainability and resilience. Transdisciplinary Engineering (TE) seeks to integrate knowledge and understanding to reduce the negative effect of engineering innovation on the environment and society, thus there likely exists a natural synergy between Industry 5.0 and TE. Consequently, in this paper we seek to understand what the opportunities and challenges of the emergence of Industry 5.0 might be for the field of TE now and in the future. A workshop involving multidisciplinary experts was convened to brainstorm and then explore perceptions. Opportunities include new research areas and potential access to funding. Challenges center on the extent that TE could, or should, align itself with Industry 5.0, and the lack of consensus around definitions of TE. Conclusions find that to attract funding, the community should clearly articulate how TE differs from complimentary and overlapping fields such as interdisciplinarity and systems engineering.