Identifying relationships of interest in complex environments by using channel theory

Complex environments show a high degree of dynamics caused by vital interactions between objects within those environments and alterations through which the set of objects and their characteristics within those environments go over time. Within this work, we show that we can tame the level of complexity in dynamic environments by identifying ‘relationships of interest’ between objects in such environments. To this end, we apply the theory of Information Flow, also known as Channel Theory, to the application area of smart manufacturing. We enhance the way how the Channel Theory has been applied so far by using an iterative approach for finding out relationships between product specifications and production capabilities. By introducing this iterative approach, we show that the Channel Theory can also be applied successfully in complex environments, which has not been reported in the literature so far.