Sustainable Floating City Production Systems—Moving Towards Industry 5.0

It has been more than a decade since the concept of Industry 4.0 was first introduced, yet experts have already begun to talk about what the next revolution will be: Industry 5.0. Over the past years, emphasis has been given to digitalization and the use of disruptive technologies to enhance efficiency and flexibility. Now, Industry 5.0 has shifted the focus to social priorities, being centered on the value of a human-centric industry and its service to humanity. Industry 5.0 is an extension of the Industry 4.0 paradigm, aiming to create a more conscious and responsible industry. It focuses on areas such as environmental protection, social responsibility, and adherence to fundamental rights. This strategy is not meant to replace the existing Industry 4.0, but rather to complement it into the future, allowing industry to co-exist with societal trends and needs, fostering the development of sustainable, resilient and human-centered systems. This paper aims to draw the link between Industry 5.0 and floating city production system as both address the pressing trends and needs of the present and the future. Floating cities offer a solution to land shortage problems faced in coastal areas by utilizing sea surface. This new market presents an opportunity to address the values of Industry 5.0, such as taking action against climate change, promoting the use of clean energy, and protecting the environment in order to create a brighter, cleaner, and healthier world. Sustainable development in this context is relying on Industry 5.0 principles to ensure progress in threatened areas and improve climate resilience. It is possible to create cities which are powered by renewable energy sources and are in harmony with the environment, leading to lower emissions and improved air quality, offering an adaptive, resilient and sustainable solution to the rising sea levels and a changing climate. Therefore, this article reflects on industrial trends for the development of floating solutions and the synergies that can be created between Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0 in this context. The floating industry has the particularity of being able to create a symbiosis between these two paradigms. On the one hand, it is essential to improve industrial processes and increase their efficiency to ensure competitiveness and, on the other hand, it is urgent to create human-centric, resilient and sustainable systems that are able to respond to the current societal problems, in order to provide better quality of life for future generations.