Industry 5.0: An Extended Experimental Case for Implementing a Multi-Level Framework for Enterprise Integration

With the rapid momentum of the Industry 5.0 paradigm due to its projected socio-economic impact, it has become essential to interpret its requirements into a concrete form. This study concentrates on an extended experimental use case, constructing a multi-level approach to address the identified challenges concerning system integration, digital transformation, interoperability, and OT-IT convergence at enterprise level. The experiment aims to evaluate a functional framework for the adoption of Industry 5.0, enhancing cooperation and collaboration, improving stability for future development and integration objectives, while respecting the general architectural design of the organizational infrastructure. The prototype involved the successful formation of a highly available enterprise infrastructure, introducing a modular development structure for Node-RED flows, augmenting system compatibility, transfer mechanisms, and protocols, including a fully dynamic data acquisition and standardization phase. The refined solution facilitates informed decision-making processes for involved personnel, while merging the OT and IT domains within an open-source, scalable, dynamic, highly-customizable and flexible framework, with minimal implementation and operational costs. This scholarly work underscores the importance of advancing towards contemporary data architectures that support and sustain growing data volumes, enhance user experience, and usability in operational processes. It champions an ideology that places scalability at the core of enterprise architecture strategies, thereby promoting advancements, performance, and growth opportunities through a single-source-of-truth (SSOT).