Operation-based Configuration Complexity Measurement for Manufacturing System

Configuration not only determines the material flow pattern but also influences the production cost in a manufacturing system. The diversity of the products and growing demands for system flexibility increases the complexity of the configuration. In this paper, an operation-based approach is proposed to measure the configuration complexity of a manufacturing system. The configuration complexity models of the stations are built with single operation, several operations and their parallel types. Subsequently, an operation-based configuration complexity model of the overall system is used to measure the configuration complexity of a manufacturing system using the information entropy. Then, the relationship of the complexity between operations and stations is quantitatively described. An assembly line example is presented to validate the model. The results show that the proposed complexity measurement may evaluate the configuration complexity of a manufacturing system.