Assessment of Assembly Process Complexity and Modularity in Mass Customized Manufacturing

An Entropy-Based Formulation for Assessing the Complexity Level of a Mass Customization Industry 4.0 Environment

“…Sonsino et al [37] talk about negative complexity, when referring to the probability decrease of choosing a "feasible" alternative (a product without incompatible components) as the complexity of that alternative increases. More specifically, References [24,31,38] claim that mass customization can both increase and decrease complexity. It is increased in the form of production program (i.e., planning and control), manufacturing (i.e., products' diversity/variants), and configuration (i.e., information overload) complexity.…”

“…Regarding the issue of mass customization variety-induced complexity, the current manufacturing complexity metrics do not reflect the true aspect of this last [24], and quantification approaches that investigate how the adoption of the Industry 4.0 paradigm increases its complexity are limited [27]. Some of the work in this venue includes Nielsen and Brunoe [67], who proposed two indexes to measure the level of mass customization, namely, the differentiation point index and the setup index, which take into account elements like number of different manufacturing processes, number of different manufactured varieties, average throughput time, number of setup, and related costs.…”

“…(1) Current manufacturing complexity metrics do not reflect the variety-induced complexity of mass customization [24] (2) e quantification of the complexity increases due to the adoption of the Industry 4.0 paradigm-more specifically, due to resources reconfigurability-is limited [27] As a first step into the development of a comprehensive metric that covers both sources of complexity, this research effort proposes an exploratory approach, with its main goal being addressing the possibility of using an entropic formulation for assessing the complexity level of a Mass Customization Industry 4.0 environment (known henceforth as the βε MC 4.0 expression). e originality of the βε MC 4.0 expression comes from its predictive and constructive validity.…”

“…In simple terms, mass customization is a value chain-based manufacturing strategy [19] that aims to offer customized goods at low cost [20]. Within this context, there is a high level of uncertainty result of the variety of customer needs/preferences [21], which when viewed in terms of an increased number of components/parts, setups, and production processes is translated into a high level of manufacturing complexity [22], referred by [23,24] as product variety-induced complexity. Moreover, the use of the Industry 4.0 potentialities is seen as an enabler of mass customization [25], when considering that Industry 4.0 is a business-wide transformation-rather than a collection of technological projects-that allows a great potential for business value creation if information is properly exploited [26].…”

“…However, a collateral effect of the adoption of the Industry 4.0 initiative, for mass customization purposes, is the increase of the manufacturing system complexity [27], which in turn translates into a system efficiency decrease, mostly because of the involved big information and material flows [20]. Now, it has been mentioned that both production flexibility and information technology can provide the means to carry out mass customization [28,29]: (i) A common way to deal with mass customization issues (i.e., product variety-induced complexity) is production flexibility [30], as the use of a flexible manufacturing system can improve manufacturing performance, by reducing setup and manufacturing lead times [24,31] (ii) e smart components of Industry 4.0 can help reduce the complexity inherent to managing the mass-customization production system [32], via the use of information technologies [21], as long as there is no lack of information quality and availability for the use of these associated technologies [33] Tjahjono et al [9] mention that, in order for Industry 4.0 to truly achieve a sustainable success in a mass customization market, it is required to rapidly identify the customer needs, to simplify the customization process, and to assure-at no extra cost-the production system reconfigurability. is last fact has implications at the operational level as this requires the integration of the plug-and-produce, fully automated, digitized, and highly cost efficient CPS units [6].…”