The Human Factor and the Resilience of Manufacturing Processes: A Case Study of Pharmaceutical Process Toward Industry 5.0

Due to the introduction of technologies following the introduction of Industry 4.0, emerging manufacturing trends are changing the operational conditions within factories. This mainly leads to the increased interconnection between systems and machines to increment production efficiency, reducing the use of raw materials, production time, and costs where the human factor should be addressed. Only recently, in 2021, an increasing interest has been devoted in the scientific literature to conceptualize an evolution of Industry 4.0 toward Industry 5.0 to account for the role of human factors within these operational transformations, where human experts are thought to cooperate with human-oriented intelligent machines. Alongside the unprecedented opportunities of knowledge management that the systems adopting an Industry 4.0 model embrace, impactful potential risks related to cyber and physical vulnerabilities need to be considered and addressed. This study aims to develop a methodology for evaluating the vulnerability of the human factor in a production process. An industrial case study is conducted to explore potential scenarios of reduced performance due to the cyber system, while also considering the role of the human factor. As one of the initial approaches, the paper examines how the system’s ability to return to its normal state depends on the interplay between human skills (operator 5.0) and the cyber system.