Modeling and measuring the structural complexity in assembly supply chain networks

Complexity of assembly supply chains (ASCs) is a challenge for designers and managers, especially when ASC systems become increasingly complex due to technological developments and geographically various sourcing arrangements. One of the major challenges at the early design stage is to make decision about an appropriate configuration of ASC. This paper addresses modeling and measuring the structural complexity of ASC networks in order to establish a framework obtaining the optimal ASC configuration. Considering relationship between supply chains and assembly systems, structural complexity measures for ASC network and assembly lines inside the network are developed based on Shannon’s information entropy. This complexity model can be used to configure supply chain networks and assembly systems with robust performance. In order to generate different feasible configurations of ASCs, a four-step algorithm is proposed considering assembly sequence constraint. Finally, the optimal ASC network is obtained by comparing the total complexity values of the feasible configurations.