Process planning and optimization techniques in additive manufacturing

Abstract

Additive manufacturing, as a production technology and a scientific field, offers a lot of potential for new research, attracts the attention and interest of manufacturing companies and the academic community. With a new approach in product design, a digital connection chain, and the possibility of producing final products with complex configurations, it has significant advantages in relation to conventional production. However, the initial investment and production costs make this technology still inaccessible to a certain number of users, with the tendency for this to change. In this sense, great attention has been paid to additive manufacturing planning, cost analysis and the possibility of optimizing structural and process parameters of production and processes. This paper is intended to explain, in a clear and concise manner, the basic assumptions of the technology, its advantages and certain disadvantages, ongoing and future trends in development as well as current areas of research (cost estimation, multi criteria decision making (MCDM), topology optimization) and applied methods and concepts. The authors believe that this paper will provide additional help in process planning for additive manufacturing as well as promote the necessity for introducing and application of different optimization techniques when designing technology for additive manufacturing.

Keywords

• additive manufacturing
• cost estimation
• mcdm techniques
• topology optimization