Industry 4.0, which was proposed ten years ago to address both the industry’s strengths and faults, has finally been replaced by Industry 5.0. It seeks to put human welfare at the core of manufacturing systems, achieving societal goals beyond employment and growth to firmly provide wealth for the long-term advancement of all of humanity. The purpose of this research is to examine the risks involved in the adoption of Industry 5.0’s architecture. The paper discusses the significance of Industry 5.0 and the advanced technology needed for this industrial revolution, followed by a detailed discussion of Industry 5.0’s human-centric strategy. The comprehensive literature review has resulted in the identification of risks and their mitigation strategies in Industry 5.0 architecture. A taxonomy with respect to different categories of risks has also been proposed. This study classifies Industry 5.0 system assets, identifies platform-independent risks, and develops countermeasures to protect against potential threats, irrespective of the business or domain.

The construction industry has always remained the economic and social backbone of any country in the world where occupational health and safety (OHS) is of prime importance. Like in other developing countries, this industry pays very little, rather negligible attention to OHS practices in Pakistan, resulting in the occurrence of a wide variety of accidents, mishaps, and near-misses every year. One of the major causes of such mishaps is the non-wearing of safety helmets (hard hats) at construction sites where falling objects from a height are unavoidable. In most cases, this leads to serious brain injuries in people present at the site in general and the workers in particular. It is one of the leading causes of human fatalities at construction sites. In the United States, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) requires construction companies through safety laws to ensure the use of well-defined personal protective equipment (PPE). It has long been a problem to ensure the use of PPE because round-the-clock human monitoring is not possible. However, such monitoring through technological aids or automated tools is very much possible. The present study describes a systematic strategy based on deep learning (DL) models built on the You-Only-Look-Once (YOLOV5) architecture that could be used for monitoring workers’ hard hats in real-time. It can indicate whether a worker is wearing a hat or not. The proposed system uses five different models of the YOLOV5, namely YOLOV5n, YOLOv5s, YOLOv5 m, YOLOv5l, and YOLOv5x for object detection with the support of PyTorch, involving 7063 images. The results of the study show that among the DL models, the YOLOV5x has a high performance of 95.8% in terms of the mAP, while the YOLOV5n has the fastest detection speed of 70.4 frames per second (FPS). The proposed model can be successfully used in practice to recognize the hard hat worn by a worker.

The agriculture sector plays a crucial role in the economy of Pakistan, contributing significantly to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the employment rate. However, this sector faces challenges such as climate change, water scarcity, and low productivity, which have a direct impact on agricultural commodity prices. Accurate forecasting of commodity prices is essential for farmers, traders, and policymakers to make informed decisions and improve economic outcomes. This paper explores the use of a big data framework for agricultural commodity price forecasting in Pakistan, using a historical dataset on commodity prices in various Pakistani cities from 2007 to 2022 and Apache Spark to preprocess and clean the data. Based on historical spinach prices in Vehari City, the machine learning models Auto-Regressive Moving Average (ARIMA), Random Forest, and Long-Short-Term Memory (LSTM) were applied to price trends, and their performance was compared using Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Mean Squared Error (MSE), Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) and squared correlation coefficient (R2). LSTM outperformed ARIMA and Random Forest with a higher R2 value of 0.8 and the lowest MAE of 125.29. Such predictions can help farmers to effectively plan crop cultivation and traders to make well-informed decisions.

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is a specialized form of wireless network that is solely intended for collaboration between vehicles. Several studies have shown that standard routing protocols cannot be implemented in VANETs because of their unique characteristics such as their significant count of vehicles on the network and the rapid evolution of the network’s design. Because VANET communication links are broken very frequently, it is necessary to address the routing consistency of these highly dynamic networks. The transmission of VANET data may result in a substantial amount of overhead in the routing process; thus, it is vital to address the issue of overhead to enhance the overall network performance. The proposed protocol named compacted area with effective links (CAEL) is designed to focus on decreasing overhead to achieve an enhancement in PDR performance inside the network. The communication between selected nodes that have been judged to be dependable in terms of geographical location and appropriate existing links between vehicles is focused on achieving this goal. With the inclusion of the reliability factor, it is possible to complete the important step of removing extraneous nodes, with the selection of the trustworthy nodes being made based on the link expiration time during the whole routing procedure. When compared to our previously published protocols, i.e., Dynamic Trilateral Enrollment (DyTE) and Reliable Group of Vehicles (RGoV), the results of the simulations demonstrate that CAEL has achieved an overall improvement in the performance of the network.

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) play a critical role in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), enabling communication between vehicles and roadside infrastructure. This paper proposes an Adaptive Context-Aware VANET Routing (ACAVR) protocol designed to handle the challenges of high mobility, dynamic topology, and variable vehicle density in urban environments. The proposed protocol integrates context-aware routing, dynamic clustering, and geographic forwarding to enhance performance under diverse traffic conditions. Simulation results demonstrate that ACAVR achieves higher throughput, improved packet delivery ratio, lower end-to-end delay, and reduced routing overhead compared to existing routing schemes. The proposed ACAVR outperforms benchmark protocols such as DyTE, RGoV, and CAEL, improving PDR by 12–18%, reducing delay by 10–15%, and increasing throughput by 15–22%.