Metal Additive Manufacturing Conference 2019

In this paper, we propose an integrated cost-benefit model to evaluate the economic utility of Additive Manufacturing (AM) for specific business cases. The high flexibility of AM enables novel product design possibilities and new production systems paradigms. The resulting creation of additional benefits for customers and companies is a subject undergoing intense study. In recent years, the application of AM has shifted its focus from prototyping to series manufacturing. However, in most cases AM-technologies still cannot compete with conventional mass production technologies in terms of production costs. A fundamental reason is that the benefits of AM are not considered by simple evaluation of production costs. Since production technologies are usually evaluated based on costs, many potential business cases remain undetected. Making use of the additional benefits of AM increases its competitiveness as a production technology. As cost comparisons will remain an inevitable part of business decisions, cost models have to incorporate additional value creation by AM . Hence, practitioners need a holistic approach to consider costs and benefits of AM simultaneously in order to determine AM business cases. Our objective is to develop an easy to use model that supports the user in identifying the relevant benefits for a specific use case and consider the added value in a cost model. A fundamental requirement to achieve this is a structured analysis and evaluation of actual advantages of AM. We conduct a literature research on AM potentials and their interdependencies. Based on expert interviews we categorize the results and build a hierarchical structure of AM benefits. The result is an interactive graph that helps users to explore new benefits and unlock their potential. The benefits are integrated into a cost model to allow a holistic quantitative evaluation of the business case. Our interactive approach based on the cytoscape graph framework helps identifying the key impact factors of the business case and makes it easy to run scenario-based analyses.