A Human-Centric Agent Architecture for Hybrid Industrial Collaboration in Industry 5.0

Abstract

The integration of AI into organizational settings leads to a growing need for hybrid human-AI collaborative approaches, necessary due to the increasing autonomy, impact and responsibility AI-based solutions have. Moreover, to ensure a sustainable integration into existing processes, such approaches must be context-aware, transparent, and human-centric. In line with the Industry 5.0 paradigm, this paper presents a novel Multi-Agent System architecture that enables meaningful collaboration between human and artificial agents through a socio-technical design approach. The proposed architecture is grounded in a structured, real-time context stream derived from organizational data sources, which semantically describe human actors, processes, and industrial resources. Central to this system is a set of four core LLM-based agents, each responsible for orchestrating hybrid human-AI tasks along distinct dimensions of timing, role selection, resource allocation, and execution sequencing. To assess the feasibility and effectiveness of the architecture, we report on an early-stage validation conducted within a representative industrial use case in the automotive sector, focused on information retrieval. In this use case, the architecture was tasked with answering a set of representative, domain-specific questions by dynamically interacting with distributed industrial databases. Results demonstrate the architecture’s ability to coordinate relevant human and artificial agents, retrieve semantically-relevant data, and present explainable outputs, showcasing its potential for supporting decision-making processes in hybrid collaborative networks.

Journal: Hybrid Human-AI Collaborative Networks

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Keywords: Multi-Agent Systems, Socio-Technical Systems, Large Language Models