Cloud-Based Additive Manufacturing as a Strategy for Product Variety: A Simulation Study

Recent research has shown the benefits of Additive Manufacturing (AM) as a tool for rapid prototyping. This paper proposes a holistic and quantitative view of 3D printing as a tool to manufacture end products. Within the context of Industry 4.0, the adoption of 3D printing to manufacture end parts has been encouraged and it is becoming feasible due to the integration of this technology with cyber-physical systems. Two test cases are conducted using discrete event simulations in two production systems, i.e. additive manufacturing and rapid tooling, given the same economic conditions. The comparison is made in different conditions of demand and product variety. The impact of these variations is observed in terms of lead time and product variety rate. The benefit observed in AM is the immunity to product variety and the drawback is the limitation of processing large volumes. In addition, the results reinforce the value of data-driven decision-making for practitioners through the use of factory virtualization.

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