Abstract:

Over the past two decades, the focus has been on transferring the concept of Industry 4.0 from research into practice. A key factor in this success has been the accompanying education and training of engineering students at universities and practitioners from industry in postgraduate continuing education programs. This situation of an exclusively digitalized environment is changing: current global developments in industrial and engineering practice against the backdrop of global upheavals in the manufacturing industry are presenting European (and globally active) SMEs with new challenges. The next major challenge for SMEs will be to implement the digital transformation towards smarter manufacturing while simultaneously addressing and accelerating the sustainability transformation to promote economically, socially and environmentally sustainable processes, factories and value chains (transformation from Industry 4.0 to 5.0). The EU-funded groundbreaking global research project ‘A Strategic Roadmap Towards the Next Level of Intelligent, Sustainable and Human-centered SMEs – SME5.0’ (which received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 10108648) aims to elevate SMEs to this next level by developing a strategic roadmap that makes them not only intelligent, but also sustainable, resilient and human-centered. SME 5.0 is the first and only EU-funded project conducting specific research to prepare SMEs for Industry 5.0. This next level of SMEs will be data- and intelligence-driven, using available data to acquire new knowledge and applying it safely for optimization purposes with the help of artificial intelligence. In this next phase of SME 5.0 factories, people will play a much more important role – they will act as ‘knowledge and skills-oriented pioneers’. In addition to identifying new future job profiles and skills for SME employees, the SME 5.0 project consortium is developing guidelines to make SME workplaces in industry more inclusive and diverse and to strengthen them, for example through engineering education and training, in order to make SME jobs in the manufacturing sector more attractive. The outcome of the SME 5.0 project helps to accelerate the introduction of Industry 5.0 in SMEs by providing the methods and tools that are currently lacking. One of the most important results presented here is a strategic roadmap with a toolkit for analysis (Industry 5.0 assessment), design (implementation guidelines) and implementation (rollout blueprint and best practice example), which can serve as a basis for the future of modern engineering education in the age of Industry 5.0 with a focus on technology-oriented SMEs. This will significantly accelerate the transition process and help SMEs in the manufacturing sector increase their global competitiveness with the help of modern engineering education.

Keywords:

Engineering Education, Industry 5.0, Industrial Engineering and Management, SME, Manufacturing, Techno-Economics.