Composition laws for learning curves of industrial manufacturingprocesses

The theory of learning curves is widely investigated in many fields related to production planning, quality improvement and cost analysis. Many different approaches to describe the learning mechanism of a process are reported in the academic literature. The aim is to analyse the behaviour of complex systems composed of a network of elementary processes whose learning curve is known. Composition laws of two basic aggregation structures, series and parallel, are discussed and analysed. The effects of these composition laws are shown in a series of practical examples.