Abstract: | Increasing global competition demands that the manufacturing industry move from mass production into mass customization production in order to provide more varieties of products to meet customer demands. It has been shown that the increase of product variety has a negative impact on manufacturing system complexity and its operational performance, especially in a mixed model assembly system. Therefore, it is of increasing interests in quantitatively assessingthe process’s capability of handling the operation complexity due to the product demand varieties. This research is at the first time to apply the communication system framework todefine quantitativecomplexity metrics forsystematically measuringa manufacturing system’scapability of handing the demands varieties. Furthermore, a system configuration model is proposedby using the algebraic expressions for efficiently and explicitly representinggeneric hybrid assemblyconfigurations. With the further extension to the algebraic performance operators,the proposed algebraic expression modeling method has a unique merit in providing computational efficiency and inference capability for systematically evaluating manufacturing system performance and decision-making for improvement. |