Additive Manufacturing Impacts on Productions and Logistics Systems

Abstract Additive Manufacturing (AM) refers to a set of production methods which comprises not only the technologies and their corresponding manufacturing processes, it also includes the supportive underlying platforms and infrastructures such as automation and \CAD\ interfaces whose proper implementation would sometimes necessitate drastic changes to take place in order to fully exploit the advantages resulting from this set of methods. The fast growth rate of \AM\ among researchers and industrialists who are active in different fields, is a proof that it has the potentials to be an effective methodology for manufacturing components and final products. This underscores the need to look into its features more closely, and provide the capacity for further improvement and implementation. This paper presents a systematic analysis of the existing literature to illustrate how AM’s industrial applications could create distinctions from those of conventional/traditional technologies, and then based on the analysis, demonstrate the need to make reconfigurations within production, distribution, and logistics processes. Although the common strategy for including a new technological system is usually to implement it through slow integration within existing technologies, the main effort in this study has been dedicated to analyse the \AM\ system in isolation, so that the activities which are already present and active within companies’ manufacturing processes can be spotted for optimization and improvements. At the end, a set of proposals are recommended in order to reconfigure the production system as well as the supply chain to enable \AM\ as a reliable and functional system.