As the industrial requirements change at a rapid pace due to the drastic evolution of technology, the necessity of quickly investigating potential system alternatives towards a more efficient manufacturing system design arises more intensely than ever. Manufacturing systems simulation has proven to be a powerful tool for designing and evaluating a manufacturing system due to its low cost, quick analysis, low risk and meaningful insight that it may provide, improving thus the understanding of the influence of each component. Simulation comprises an indispensable set of IT tools and methods for the successful implementation of digital manufacturing. It allows experimentation and validation of product, process, and system design and configuration. This paper investigates the major historical milestones in the evolution of manufacturing systems simulation technologies and examines recent industrial and research approaches in key fields of manufacturing. It describes how the urge towards digitalisation of manufacturing in the context of the 4th Industrial revolution has shaped simulation in the design and operation of manufacturing systems and reviews the new approaches that have arisen in the literature. Particular focus is given to technologies in the digitalised factories of the future that are gaining ground in industrial applications simulation, offering multiple advantages.

In the era of Industry 4.0, manufacturing and production systems were revolutionized by increasing operational efficiency and developing and implementing new business models, services, and products. Concretely, the milestone set for Industry 4.0 was to improve the sustainability and efficiency of production systems. By extension, the emphasis was focused on both the digitization and the digitalization of systems, providing room for further improvement. However, the current technological evolution is more system/machine-oriented, rather than human-oriented. Thus, several countries have begun orchestrating initiatives towards the design and development of the human-centric aspect of technologies, systems, and services, which has been coined as Industry 5.0. The impact of Industry 5.0 will extend to societal transformation, which eventually leads to the generation of a new society, the Society 5.0. The developments will be focused on the social and human-centric aspect of the tools and technologies introduced under the framework of Industry 4.0. Therefore, sustainability and human well-being will be at the heart of what comes next, the Industry 5.0, as a subset of Society 5.0. Industry 5.0 will build on the foundations laid during Industry 4.0 by emphasizing human-centered, resilient, and sustainable design. Consequently, the authors in this research work, through a critical literature review, aim to provide adequate reasoning for considering Industry 5.0 as a framework for enabling the coexistence of industry and emerging societal trends and needs. The contribution of this research work extends to the provision of a framework to facilitate the transition from Industry 4.0 to Society 5.0.

The radical evolution of internet into a network of interconnected objects that create a smart environment is characterized by the term Internet of Things (IoT). The adoption of IoT in manufacturing enables the transition of tradition manufacturing systems into modern digitalized ones, generating significant economic opportunities through industries re-shaping. Industrial IoT empowers the modern companies to adopt new data-driven strategies and handle the global competitive pressure more easily. However, the adoption of IoT, increases the total volume of the generated data transforming the industrial data into industrial Big Data. The work demonstrated in this paper presents how the adoption of IoT in manufacturing, considering sensory systems and mobile devices, will generate industrial Big Data. Moreover, a developed IoT application is presented showing how real industrial data can be generated leading to Industrial Big Data. The proposed methodology is validated in a real life case study from a mould-making industry