ABSTRACT
To facilitate the continuous improvement of performance and the management of information flow (MIF) for production and manufacturing purposes on the shop floor of developing countries, there is a need to characterize information flow that will be shared during the process. MIF provides a key performance shop floor metric called the value of information flow (VIF). Previous methods have been used to analyze VIF in developed countries. However, these methods are sometimes limited when applied to developing countries where the shop floor is disorganized. It then renders the MIF with the imported software inefficient because of the gap between the user environments. Taking Cameroon as a case study, this study proposes a new method of modeling and analyzing the information flow and its value based on the characteristics of information flow (CIF) for developing countries. In addition, a predictive analysis of the VIF based on CIF using an artificial neural network (ANN) on one hand and optimized ANN with particle swarm optimizer (PSO) and genetic algorithms (GA) on the other is performed. The ANN model of regression developed has the following performance: coefficient of determination: 0.99 and mean squared error (MSE): 0.00043. For the PSO-ANN, the MSE decreased to 0.00011, and this model result was similar to that of the deep learning model used for regression. The GA-ANN model results were not as satisfactory as those of the PSO-ANN model. A predictive system to analyze VIF is proposed for managers of companies in developing countries.
