Evaluating Industry 4.0 Manufacturing Configurations: An Entropy-Based Grey Relational Analysis Approach

Worldwide manufacturing and service sectors are choosing to transform the existing manufacturing sector, particularly reconfigurable manufacturing systems using the technologies of the next generation Industry 4.0. In order to satisfy the demands of the fourth industrial revolution, model evaluation and assessing various candidate configurations in reconfigurable manufacturing systems was developed. The proposed model considers evolving consumer demands and evaluates manufacturing configurations using a gray relational approach. For the case at hand, it is evident that considering all possible dynamic market scenarios 1 to 6, the current manufacturing configuration, i.e., alternative 1, has 89% utilization, total 475 h of earliness and 185 h of lateness in the order demand delivery to the market, and a total of 248 throughput hours and around 1143 bottleneck hours. The main challenge is to make a perfect match between the market demands, variations in product geometry, manufacturing processes and several reconfiguration strategies/alternatives. Furthermore, it is evident that alternative 1 should be reconfigured and that alternative 3 is the best choice. Alternative 3 exhibits 86% system utilization, a total of 926 h of earliness and 521 h of lateness in the order demand delivery to the market, and a total of 127 throughput hours and around 853 bottleneck hours. A simulation framework is used to demonstrate the efficacy of each possible reconfigurable production setup. The sensitivity analysis is also carried out by adjusting the weights through principal component analysis and validating the acquired ranking order. Thus, if the decision makers want to provide a preference to all criteria, the order of the choices of configurations is found to be alternative 3, alternative 1, alternative 4, alternative 2 and alternative 5.