Human-centricity in manufacturing is becoming an essential enabler to achieve social sustainable manufacturing. In particular, human-centric automation can offer new means to increase competitiveness in the face of new social challenges for the factories of the future. This paper proposes a Human-Centred Reference Architecture that can structure and guide efforts to engineer Next Generation Balanced Automation Systems featuring adaptive automation that take into account various criteria in the operating environment such as time-lapse, performance degradation, age-, disability- and inexperience-related limitations of operators to increase their working capabilities.