A vagueness measure for concurrent engineering of manual assembly lines

AbstractIn concurrent engineering, uncertainty in process planning arises because product design remains unfinished. Common solutions involve staying vague or creating concrete but speculative plans. In this work, a vagueness measure for process descriptions is proposed. The proposed method employs a controlled natural language for process descriptions. The measure is applied to an automotive end assembly project. Results show that the vagueness measure in initial planning is correlated with the number of changes in both work task attributes and work task descriptions. Future applications could address optimisation of planning detail throughout concurrent process planning.