Development of the complexity measure for assembly line systems using entropy concept

This paper aims at understanding the complexity of the assembly line systems, and the entropy is introduced to modeling the assembly line system. In order to describe the assembly line more exactly, three kinds of complexity are classified and measured, which is structure complexity, process complexity and operation complexity. The structure complexity is used to measure the level of complexity about the assembly line itself, the process complexity can measure the complexity when the assembly line produce only one product, and the operation complexity can describe the complexity when the assembly line produces a batch of products under given scheduling rule. The operation complexity and process complexity are both decomposed into static and dynamic complexity. Finally two kinds of effectiveness of schedule are measured and applied to forecast the number of buffers between two assembly lines when the effectiveness of schedule is under given value.