Investigating challenges impeding transition from Industry 4.0 to Industry 5.0 in smart manufacturing systems

This work systematically investigates the challenges impeding the organizational transition from Industry 4.0 to Industry 5.0 in smart manufacturing. A systematic literature review protocol was applied, sourcing 39 high-quality peer-reviewed publications from the Web of Science database (2019-2024), filtered through rigorous inclusion and exclusion criteria. A total of 16 key challenges were identified, which are further categorized as organizational, social, and environmental, considerably affecting the transition from Industry 4.0 to 5.0. Eight of these challenges were classified as critical challenges based on citation in the literature are: Non-human-centered approach, insufficient training and new competences, environmental sustainability, risk in privacy and data security, lack of knowledge management, work-life balance, job loss and job market transformation and increased energy demand. Further, a rigor and relevance assessment of these 39 studies is carried out, which revealed strong methodological quality and practical applicability but lacked empirical robustness. The results emphasize the necessity for the development of a hybrid industrial framework that fuses the technological strengths of Industry 4.0 with the ethical and sustainable values of Industry 5.0.