Personal Preference and Trade-Off Based Additive Manufacturing Web Service Selection

The growing number of Additive Manufacturing Web (AMW) services, offered by different providers over the Internet, makes it challenging for consumers to compare these AMW services to select a service of their choice. In addition, it is even more challenging for consumers to compare these AMW services against their personal preferences. This is because, consumers personal preferences on multiple non-functional attributes such as price, material, accuracy and schedule, should be considered for AMW service selection. The decentralized nature of AMW services coupled by the need to consider consumers personal preferences during AMW service selection, requires a system that will serve as a broker between AMW services and consumers. In this paper, we propose a service broker system for AMW services that provides consumers with a single point of access to a large number of AMW services from many additive manufacturing service providers. This broker system also incorporates the first real application of service selection with fuzzy logic based personalized preferences and trade-off. We develop a method to generate fuzzy membership functions for each non-functional attribute. This makes it easy for consumers to specify their fuzzy membership functions. Finally, we present an application case study to demonstrate the feasibility of brokerage in AMW services and also evaluate our method in terms of performance.