Modelling of Manufacturing Complexity in Network Systems: A new way to model complexity in manufacturing networks and its application to system re-engineering

This book examines the nature of structural complexity in manufacturing networks. Structural complexity is the information required to monitor manufacturing systems with specific focus on the systems that have a network structure and the effect of inter-dependency of components within the system on the performance. This research proposes novel structural complexity measures for a variety of management problems, i.e. routing, production status change, sequence disorder and buffer size variation. With the proposed measures, structural complexity can be applied to broader types of systems, i.e. series-parallel system, buffer system and rework system. In addition, a number of heuristic approaches are implemented in a computer program for re- engineering purpose using throughput and complexity measures. Overall, the new methodology can positively contribute to better system design techniques, where system simplicity and streamlined flow are as important as high productivity and cost saving.