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

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.