Advancing Sustainable Decision Making in Additive Manufacturing: A Comprehensive Review of Multi-Criteria Decision Making Approaches

Abstract

Additive manufacturing (AM) is one of the technologies of Industry 4.0 that has been contributing to the development of different manufacturing industries. The integration of sustainability concepts into additive manufacturing has been gaining attention among researchers. This integration is essential in the development of AM technologies and can be a significant asset in terms of decision making for organizations. This work aims to present a concise literature review on the integration of decision making, especially multi-criteria decision making, and sustainability into the AM environment. The literature on this topic currently possesses a total of fifteen documents, which were analyzed in this work. Some developments on this topic have been achieved in domains such as material selection, process selection and challenges, and drivers’ analysis of sustainable AM. This review shows that even though there has been an effort in recent years to integrate sustainability into additive manufacturing, there is still a long road to the development of this topic for the future, and so some recommendations for future research paths are presented.

Keywords

• additive manufacturing
• 3D printing
• MCDM
• decision making
• sustainability