Production planning in additive manufacturing and 3D printing

Additive manufacturing is a new and emerging technology and has been shown to be the future of manufacturing systems. Because of the high purchasing and processing costs of additive manufacturing machines, the planning and scheduling of parts to be processed on these machines play a vital role in reducing operational costs, providing service to customers with less price and increasing the profitability of companies which provide such services. However, this topic has not yet been studied in the literature, although cost functions have been developed to calculate the average production cost per volume of material for additive manufacturing machines.In an environment where there are machines with different specifications (i.e. production time and cost per volume of material, processing time per unit height, set-up time, maximum supported area and height, etc.) and parts in different heights, areas and volumes, allocation of parts to machines in different sets or groups to minimize the average production cost per volume of material constitutes an interesting and challenging research problem. This paper defines the problem for the first time in the literature and proposes a mathematical model to formulate it. The mathematical model is coded in CPLEX and two different heuristic procedures, namely ‘best-fit’ and ‘adapted best-fit’ rules, are developed in JavaScript. Solution-building mechanisms of the proposed heuristics are explained stepwise through examples. A numerical example is also given, for which an optimum solution and heuristic solutions are provided in detail, for illustration. Test problems are created and a comprehensive experimental study is conducted to test the performance of the heuristics. Experimental tests indicate that both heuristics provide promising results. The necessity of planning additive manufacturing machines in reducing processing costs is also verified.