An Industry 5.0 Perspective on Feeding Production Lines

Abstract

The emerging concept of Industry 5.0 is fostering companies to consider the three pillars of human-centricity, sustainability, and resilience. How such a new perspective can be effectively declined and practically guide the introduction of new technologies is a challenge to be addressed. This study proposes a framework to support companies when introducing new solutions to feed production lines by adopting an Industry 5.0 perspective. For each fundamental pillar, critical points to focus on have been highlighted and operational checklists have been developed to effectively support the analysis and implementation of new solutions. The application of the framework and related operational checklists to a case study regarding the integration of an Autonomous Mobile Robot system has proved its validity. Following the human-centricity checklist, full acceptance of the new technology by workers has been gained, together with a safer workplace. Energy savings for material handling and recycling have been supported about the sustainability pillar, while redundancy and backup systems have increased the resilience of the feeding system.