Abstract
It has been stated that Industry 4.0’s goal is, among others, the sustainable success in a market characterized by exigent and informed consumers demanding personalized products and services, where the level of manufacturing complexity increases with level of product customization. Even though different manufacturing complexity measures have been developed, there seems to be a lack of a comprehensive metric that address both the mass customization variety-induced complexity, and the complexity derived from the adoption of the Industry 4.0 paradigm. The main original contribution of this paper is the development of an entropy-based (entropic) formulation to address this last issue. Its validity and usefulness is put to the test via a discrete-event simulation study of a mass customization production system operating within an Industry 4.0 context. Our findings show that the entropic formulation acts as a fairly good trend indicator of the system’s performance parameter increase/decrease, but not as an estimator of the final values. A discussion of the managerial implications of the obtained results is offered at the end of the paper.
Highlights
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. e originality of the βεMC4.0 expression comes from its predictive and constructive validity. e predictive validity refers to the ability to “predict” a theorized outcome, which is provided by following an entropy-based approach, as suggested by Reference [56]. e construct validity refers to the formality of the development process, which is based on previous published work by the author [76, 77], where an entropybased metric of a product’s BOM blocking effect is derived
It must be noted that, in order for the βεMC4.0 expression to truly represent the manufacturing complexity of a mass customization production system operating within an Industry 4.0 environment, the complexity contribution of the product, process, and resources elements must be taken into account. ese elements refer to (i) Product: the different number of manufactured products, the number of number of corresponding components and functions, and the overall products’ mix ratio (ii) Process: the different routings for each product and the corresponding processing times (iii) Resources: the different types of machinery, number and type of operations capable of performing, and number of required setups
Martınez-Olvera explained in his work of [76] (equation (1)) and [77] (equation (2)) why formulations such as the ones presented by [58, 86] need to be modified in order to reflect the impact the BOM structure has on the process flow
Summary
3M2 + 3M4 4M3 + 4M4 2M1 + 2M2 + 2M4 2M1 + 4M3 + 6M4 2M1 + 1M2 + 2M3 + 5M4 1M1 + 2M2 + 2M3 + 7M4 3M1 + 3M2 + 6M4 3M1 + 6M3 + 9M4 3M1 + 1M2 + 4M3 + 8M4 2M1 + 3M2 + 2M3 + 9M4. Equations (1) and (2) must be adapted in order to reflect the manufacturing complexity contribution to the mass customization production system operating within an Industry 4.0 environment: βεΝΒ. For this matter, both equations (1) and (2) were manipulated for different combinations of the P log P expression, i.e., P log P, P log (1/P), (1/P) log P, (1/P) log (1/ P), and 1/[(1/P) log 2 (1/P)], until one combination resembled the observed behavior of the system (Figures 4(a) through 4(d)). The βεMC4.0 expression took the form of βεMC4.0
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