Abstract
Supply chain disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic exposed structural vulnerabilities of centrally controlled manufacturing systems, motivating renewed interest in organizational resilience within the context of Industry 5.0 human–cyber–physical systems. This study investigates how organizational decision-making paradigms and crisis-aware artificial intelligence (AI) jointly influence performance, crisis response, and recovery. An agent-based modeling (ABM) framework is developed to compare centralized, distributed, and self-organized organizational structures across 650 simulation runs under a controlled supply side disruption. A crisis-aware Q-learning architecture enables AI agents to shift from efficiency-oriented to stability-oriented strategies when resource scarcity is detected. To avoid baseline-dependent bias, resilience is evaluated using an absolute, capacity-normalized metric. Results indicate that self-organized systems consistently outperform centralized and distributed structures in baseline performance, crisis throughput, and recovery speed. The integration of crisis-aware AI further increases absolute resilience by approximately 10.7% and enables substantially higher throughput during disruption compared to hierarchical control. Enhanced performance is primarily driven by adaptive coalition formation, proactive resource conservation, and rapid post-crisis recovery supported by preserved coordination structures. These findings provide quantitative support for Industry 5.0’s human-centric principles and show that decentralized decision-making augmented by context-adaptive AI offers a robust organizational design strategy for volatile manufacturing environments.