Governing the Agentic Web: A Confidence-Gated Human-AI Collaboration Framework for Cloud-Native Autonomous Logistics in the Industry 5.0 Era

Abstract

Global logistics networks, valued at approximately $9.6 trillion in 2023, face a structural governance crisis: deterministic automation paradigms are fundamentally inadequate for the concurrent, geographically distributed disruptions that define the contemporary supply chain environment. This article introduces the Intelligent Logistics Orchestration Architecture (ILOA) - a unified framework for deploying agentic artificial intelligence (AI) in cloud-native logistics systems under the Industry 5.0 paradigm. At its core is a confidence-gated Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) middleware layer that partitions decisions between autonomous execution and human review using a formally optimized threshold τ, derived through Pareto analysis across decision accuracy, operator escalation rate, and mean response latency. Four integrated layers constitute the ILOA: Kubernetes/Knative serverless infrastructure with scale-to-zero economics; WebAssembly (Wasm) edge nodes delivering sub-50 millisecond safety-critical responses; a Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) intelligence layer using Centralized Training with Decentralized Execution (CTDE); and a Security Sidecar enforcing governance through Model Context Protocol (MCP) schema validation and cryptographic agent registry enforcement. Three original contributions distinguish this work: a formal unification of confidence-gated HITL governance with MARL-based orchestration under a Markov Decision Process (MDP) formalism; the Centaur Collaboration Taxonomy, a four-mode authority model mapping decision-class characteristics to human-AI collaboration patterns; and the formalization of Shadow AI proliferation as a distinct governance risk category with potential implications for EU AI Act Articles 9 and 13 compliance. A three-stage implementation roadmap and a discussion of potential contributions to UN Sustainable Development Goals SDG 9 and SDG 12 provide a conceptual deployment pathway informed by regulatory and sustainability considerations.