Approach for Measuring Change-induced Complexity based on the Production Architecture.

Handling complexity will be a necessity for manufacturing companies to assert themselves against global competitors in highly volatile markets. Therefore complexity is an important target value in planning and operating production systems, because external and internal changes arise more frequently. We show an approach to evaluate complexity induced by changes in the field of production. With a structure-based measure of complexity, system modifications in each lifecycle phase can be analyzed in terms of existing or expected complexity. In order to guarantee high usability, we present an intuitive visualization. The validation is carried out in the automotive industry, where the complexity of developing an engine assembly was examined.