Modelling and quantification of industry 4.0 manufacturing complexity based on information theory: a robotics case study

Abstract

The new industrial revolution called Industry 4.0 imposes new challenges to the research community. One of the main issues in Industry 4.0 is the management of the huge amount of information exchanged among its different integrated systems. The present work demonstrates how the traditional manufacturing system is transformed to the Industry 4.0 manufacturing system and proposes a modelling and quantification approach, which includes metrics from the Information Theory estimating the complexity and the capacity of the Industry 4.0, from the perspective of the communication among the systems. The application impact of the proposed Industry 4.0 system and the comparison of these metrics before and after shifting to Industry 4.0 is also analysed and validated in a case study from the Robotics Industry.

Keywords:

• Industry 4.0
• complexity
• information theory
• entropy

ORCID

Dimitris Mourtzis http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7923-7363

Nikoletta Boli http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9900-2684