Axiomatic Design Based Complexity Measures to Assess Product and Process Structures

Abstract

Definitions of complexity often depend on several circumstances, such as the nature of investigated complex system, the kind of complexity, the conceptual framework used for a study, the theoretical approach taken, and the like. In this paper, two complexity measures that are based on Boltzmann’s entropy concept and AD theory are proposed and described. The first measure quantifies product variety complexity and the second one focuses on process structure complexity. Such complexity techniques will be used to determine product platform complexity and related process complexity for early stage of design decision-making. The method focused on product platform complexity assumes that the distribution of FR-DP couplings offers a suitable complexity concept, which prescribes that coupled designs should be decoupled, if possible, since uncoupled design is ideal and a decoupled design is less good, while a coupled design is the least satisfactory. Analogically, the same principle is used for the purpose to quantify topological process complexity by transforming input components into process variables and product modules including final product into design parameters. Subsequently, relevant properties of these measures will be analysed by computational experiments. Finally, practical findings for mass customization practice will be presented.

Complexity Assessment of Assembly Supply Chains from the Sustainability Viewpoint

“…where N j is interpreted as the number of interactions per single DP. Its application to measure the structural complexity of ASC was provided by Modrak and Soltysova [37], where the model of assembly process is structured with two groups of objects, while the first group is denoted as input components (ICs) and the second group as workstations. The input components are assembled at these workstations.…”

Industry 4.0 for SMEs

“…On the other hand, there is a dearth of process modularity measures, which could be simply applied for managerial purposes. For this reason, we proposed to adopt the SMI to measure the degree of modularity of manufacturing processes (Modrak and Soltysova 2018a).…”