Empowering Industry 5.0: A Multicriteria Framework for Energy Sustainability in Industrial Companies

Industry 5.0 introduces a transformative vision for manufacturing by emphasizing human-centricity, sustainability, and resilience in tandem with advanced technologies. While Industry 4.0 focused on automation and connectivity, Industry 5.0 shifts the paradigm toward enhancing human involvement, environmental responsibility, and adaptive capacity. Despite growing interest, there remains a lack of standardized metrics for evaluating Industry 5.0 implementation within companies. This paper proposes a comprehensive multicriteria evaluation framework to assess a company’s alignment with Industry 5.0 principles across ten key criteria from the human-centricity, sustainability and resilience sectors. A structured scoring system—ranging from A (full alignment) to E (no alignment)—was developed to quantify implementation maturity. The framework was applied to a medium-sized Lithuanian manufacturing company specializing in furniture components, providing a real-world case study to validate the method. The company received a low Industry 5.0 score, indicating poor alignment; however, targeted recommendations were proposed that could improve the score by nearly 70%, moving the company toward a well-aligned status. This study offers a practical tool for evaluating and guiding Industry 5.0 transitions in manufacturing contexts.