Digital Transformation in the Era of Industry 4.0 and Society 5.0: A perspective

As an aftermath of the 4th Industrial Revolution at the beginning of century XXI, augmented information integrated into a cyber-physical system has changed the information age. From this point in mankind's history (circa 2012), emerging technologies to allow operations of everything in a smarter way have led both industry and society to re-think well-established processes or scratch new ones for (re) executions of anything as much as autonomous and intelligent. It permitted unforeseen improvements in the economy and well-being towards high-level standards of efficiency, sustainability, and safety, to name a few. Within the so-called Industry 4.0 (I4) age, advances in information and computing technologies (ICT) coupled with new capabilities in modeling and solving algorithms (MSA) and mechatronics (MEC) have enabled improvements in both industry and society. In industry, it represents more innovative design, operation, and control in several fields of manufacturing, logistics and supply chains, agricultural productions, etc. In society, besides the widespread information and communication capabilities that transformed the previous states of society into a more interconnected world, we observe the rise of crowdsourcing that aims to meet a reduced operational cost at the shared phase of new business models. Additionally, in the wake of the global 1st pandemic occurring within the era of high-tech communities, the push in the educational processes has modified how individuals share, connect, and communicate a collection of workloads, expertise, follow-ups, etc., where capabilities, readiness, and preparedness have changed in the named Society 5.0 (S5). In this work, we analyze the interplay of I4 pillars in industry and society to identify gaps and challenges in the research and development to be overcome towards an achievable deployment within a complete I4-S5 phase.