Towards resilience in Industry 5.0: A decentralized autonomous manufacturing paradigm

Manufacturers are increasingly aware of the importance of system resilience against unexpected disruptive occurrences, such as the recent global Covid-19 pandemic and geopolitical wars in Europe. Meanwhile, Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) is recently envisioned as the Blockchain 3.0 stage, in which enabling DAO in the manufacturing domain could be a promising attempt and will lead to decentralized autonomous manufacturing. Blockchain-enabled smart contracts and decentralized applications have the characteristics of verifiability, decentralization, transparency, autonomy, and tamper-proofing, which can enable a mass individualization paradigm to realize the promising Industry 5.0 vision of resilience. DAO provides a probable manner to regulate cross-prosumer activities under the Industry 5.0 context. Inspired by this vision, our paper reviews the literature on Decentralized Manufacturing (DM) and Autonomous Manufacturing (AM). Then, these two streams of efforts are unified, and a manufacturing paradigm, named Decentralized Autonomous Manufacturing (DAM), is defined towards resilience in Industry 5.0. In this paper, a reference architecture of the DAM is given. Followed by a comprehensive investigation of the key enablers, challenges, and barriers in the implementation of DAM, based on the insights from this analysis, future research directions of DAM are highlighted. We believe that our effort can lay a foundation for positioning DAM in futuristic Industry 5.0 research and engineering practice.