An Entropy-Based Formulation for the Support of Sustainable Mass Customization 4.0

Industry 4.0, an information and communication umbrella of terms that includes the Internet of Things (IoT) and cyber-physical systems, aims to ensure the future of the manufacturing industry competing in a proper environment of mass customization: demand for short delivery time, high quality, and small-lot products. Within this context of an Industry 4.0 mass customization environment, success depends on its sustainability, where the latter can only be achieved by the manufacturing efficiency of the smart factory-based Industry 4.0 transforming processes. Even though Industry 4.0 is associated with an optimal resource and energy productivity/efficiency, it becomes necessary to answer if the integration of Industry 4.0 elements (like CPS) has a favorable sustainability payoff. This requires performing energy consumption what-if analyses. The original contribution of this paper is the use of the entropy-based formulation as an alternative way of performing the initial steps of the energy consumption what-if analyses. The usefulness of the proposed approach is demonstrated by comparing the results of a discrete-event simulation model of mass customization 4.0 environment and the values obtained by using the entropy-based formulation. The obtained results suggest that the entropy-based formulation acts as a fairly good trend indicator of the system’s performance parameters increase/decrease. The managerial implications of these findings are presented at the end of this document.