Complexity Analysis of Assembly Supply Chains

Background

• Product variety increases due to today’s fierce competition in market
• Companies move from traditional non-modular assembly supply chains to modular assembly supply chains to cope with the increasing variety
• Companies want to know how to make the decisions about supply chain configuration
• Direct cost comparison is difficult and some parameters are not available

Objective

• Proposing to use a new performance measure, complexity, to evaluate the supply chain
• Investigating the relationship between complexity and cost of an assembly supply chain
• Developing an algorithm to find optimal supply chain configuration

Approach

• Defining the complexity measure based on Shannon’s information entropy
• Using majorization theory and Design of Experiments (DOE) methods to study the relationship between complexity and cost
• Developing an iteration decomposition algorithm to find optimal supply chain configuration

Researchers

• Hui John Wang
• Prof. Goker Aydin (IOE)