A Techno-Economic Study of Industry 5.0 Enterprise Deployments for Human-to-Machine Communications

Ongoing disruptions from the persistence of COVID–19 are providing a strong impetus for deploying Industry 5.0. With a focus on the collaboration between geographically separated humans and machines, Industry 5.0 is envisioned to boost productivity and efficiency on the factory floor and engage with customers from afar. Collaborative robots (cobots) will be extensions of the human body through being controlled in real time and from a distance. Early rollouts of Industry 5.0 are expected to be cost-sensitive private enterprise networks that support inter- and intra-plant human-to-machine (H2M) communications. This article explores the cost efficiency of six existing and evolutionary enterprise network architectures to meet the future demands of Industry 5.0 and presents the first comprehensive techno-economic study balancing Industry 5.0 requirements and cost. Results highlight that the emerging time- and wave-length-division multiplexed passive optical local area network (TWDM-POL) and TWDM-POL allied with wireless local area network technology are compelling enterprise architectures for Industry 5.0 deployment as they yield noteworthy cost savings when considering scalability and mobility, respectively.