The Future of Disassembly Planning: A Critical Assessment of Industry 5.0, Lean, and X-Reality

Disassembly is a key step in most end-of-life (EoL) product recycling strategies. Traditional disassembly entails paradigmatic and technological shifts to support process planning. Industry 5.0 and X-reality (XR) are notable representatives in this context. With the extension of societal transformation, Industry 5.0 aims to build a human-technology or human-machine companion to emphasize the importance of human safety and well-being. XR encompasses virtual and augmented reality technologies and addresses the human-reality gap in virtual worlds. By leveraging XR to simulate and visualize product information and experimental operations, disassembly planning can be facilitated. However, the roles of Industry 5.0 and XR in EoL disassembly remain underexplored, and the existing literature has neglected the possibility of linking them with lean. This paper first reviewed the extant literature on the potential association of Industry 5.0, lean, and XR for disassembly planning, offering one of the first research articles to highlight current trends. This paper further presented the preliminary work by constructing a tri-dimensional framework to combine three paradigms of human-centric, smart, and lean in the disassembly domain under Industry 5.0. Our findings not only underline the emerging gaps and the unexplored areas but also offer a valuable framework to advance digital disassembly transformation.