Toward developing agility evaluation of mass customization systems using 2-tuple linguistic computing

Mass customization (MC) relates to the ability to provide individually designed products and services to every customer through high process flexibility and integration. For responding to the mass customization trend it is necessary to develop an agility-based manufacturing system to catch on the traits involved in MC. An MC manufacturing agility evaluation approach based on concepts of TOPSIS is proposed through analyzing the agility of organization management, product design, processing manufacture, partnership formation capability and integration of information system. The 2-tuple fuzzy linguistic computing manner to transform the heterogeneous information assessed by multiple experts into an identical decision domain is inherent in the proposed method. It is expected to aggregate experts’ heterogeneous information, and offer sufficient and conclusive information for evaluating the agile manufacturing alternatives. And then a suitable agile system for implementing MC can be established. 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.