Industry 5.0 for Inclusive Smart Factories
Published on : Saturday 06-01-2024
Industry 5.0 is not just another new topic for CXO level discussion and investment, says S Ramachandran.
Many organisations consider Industry 4.0 or the fourth industrial revolution as the ultimate path to pursue for their digital transformation. There are several successful implementations of Industry 4.0 or I4.0 that achieved significant business benefits. However, many more organisations still struggle to scale-up from pilot projects. While I4.0 continues to face challenges, there is already talk about Industry 5.0! It is not a completely new paradigm (Figure 1). I5.0 complements the I4.0 concepts and builds upon it, with a bigger picture and connects to the society, with a focus on human centricity, sustainability, and resilience.
The basic tenets of I4.0 were defined by the German government. They are interoperability with technologies such as IoT for connectivity, information transparency with digital twins for example for what-if analyses, technical assistance with analytics, and autonomous decentralised decisions with artificial intelligence. In the Infosys Data+AI Radar study, we called it the SURE taxonomy: Sense, Understand, Respond, and Evolve, to represent the four levels of autonomy or artificial intelligence systems. According to the study, 63% of enterprises operate at the basic Sense and Understand levels today (Figure 2), with only 15% at the highest Evolve level. This gap highlights opportunities to generate significant benefits through autonomous and interconnected systems. Keeping the bigger picture in mind at all stages in the SURE model takes us closer to achieving the goals of I5.0.
The European Union says the I5.0 approach 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”. One fear with automation is the loss of jobs, with machines and algorithms taking away the role played by humans. It is a trade-off business leaders need to make. Jobs that are high on programmability and low on decision making will eventually be automated. But there are several jobs that will continue to need human intervention for decisions to be made. Such jobs will mean humans working in collaboration with non-human entities.
AI to augment humans
Cobots are an example on the shop floor, where robots work in collaboration with humans as colleagues. A cobot will not focus just on efficiency, but safety too. Sales of industrial robots reached a record level of more than 517K in 2021, according to the International Federation of Robotics, a growth of 31% year-on-year. Interestingly, the share of cobots in this has been growing steadily, again reaching a record of 7.5% in 2021, a growth of 50% compared to 2020! Ongoing research on ergonomic interaction between robots and humans will be an area to watch out for.
Autonomous vehicles find the streets of cities too challenging to navigate. General Motors recently stopped its driverless vehicle Cruise operation, following an accident in California. On the other hand, they find impactful applications in niche industrial applications such as warehouse and shop floor material movement. Kimberly-Clark, for example, has deployed more than 300 autonomous forklifts at its North American warehouses, up from about 30 in 2019, according to Sarah Haffer, vice president of customer logistics. Warehouses are messy and risky for humans and autonomous vehicles to work together. Kimberly-Clark has segregated its warehouses “into physical areas where only (forklifts) live and physical areas where only people are doing particular work, and we don’t cross over”, says Haffer. Not all companies may be able to segregate, forcing humans to work safely with the autonomous vehicles.
Generative AI will be the language of factories of the future, for cognitive capabilities. Large language models trained using historical artifacts and reinforced with ongoing interactions will provide conversational AI capabilities. Queries can be resolved by bots. Documents and codes can be auto generated first before a human finetunes it. The Generative AI Radar for North America published by Infosys reported enhanced user experience and personalisation as the use case with the most positive impact. But there is a significant opportunity for inward looking operational efficiency and automation too with Generative AI.
The joint study on sustainability conducted by Infosys and the Manufacturers Alliance Foundation reported interesting findings. 70% manufacturers who participated in the study said that tracking Scope 3 emissions is the hardest and they were yet to start. Only 28% of the participants had a system in place to track the carbon footprint of their products. Initiatives such as a supply chain control tower will play a key role in I5.0 to measure the upstream and downstream Scope 3 carbon emission for manufacturers, beyond the walls of a factory. Carbon capture, utilisation, and capture was a controversial topic in the COP28 summit, specifically for developing countries which have sources of fossil fuel. Their continued usage would lead to Scope 1 and 2 emissions. Control towers will play a key role for resilience too, providing timely visibility and traceability across the supply chain to take proactive, corrective action.
A standardised model for autonomous systems
The diversity of systems that will exist in a futuristic factory signifies the need for interoperability, for these systems to talk to each other. In a recent article on the need for such a standardised model, we looked at its characteristics, and how the generic levels of autonomy will look like. A factory can no longer be confined to talk to other systems only within its boundary such as the ERP and MES systems, but with other enterprise applications and beyond for IT-OT integration. Operational technology or OT, the language of the factory, should communicate with IT or Information technology across the enterprise – supply chain management, customer relationship management, product lifecycle management and more. I5.0 will take this further beyond the enterprise to systems such as skill and talent management, weather forecasts, healthcare, and multimodal traffic visibility to name a few.
Industry 5.0 is not just another new topic for CXO level discussion and investment! If organisations currently investing in I4.0 are aware of it well ahead of time, they can bring about a green, inclusive transformation by keeping the human, sustainability, and resilience perspectives in mind from the very start.
S Ramachandran is Principal Consultant, Lead for Engineering and Manufacturing, Infosys Knowledge Institute. He is an author and speaker for thought leadership – emerging technologies for manufacturing systems, supply chain management, innovation providing in-depth research, analysis and insights.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ramachsu/
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