Challenges in Processing Digital and Physical Parts in Additive Manufacturing: An Exploration

Additive Manufacturing (AM) - 3D printing for the purpose of industrial production - is known for enabling individualization and freedom of design. Furthermore, AM enables digital transformation in production through its highly digitized process, which often is simplified as directly printing a physical part from CAD data. The objective of this paper is to identify and describe requirements on Information Systems based on the physical and digital objects of the AM process. Since AM is an uprising manufacturing technology, an exploratory research design is chosen based on semi-structured interviews in German enterprises. Firstly, the digital attributes of an AM part that are crucial to product quality need to be defined. Besides the geometry of an AM part, data from different AM process phases are crucial - e.g. production parameters. Secondly, identification of parts and their virtual representations in different steps of the AM process becomes more relevant. In particular, multiple parts are often arranged in one build job for AM processing but should be traced individually. Thirdly, there is demand to digitally manage diverse manufacturing conditions of AM parts, since a part could be produced by several build jobs on different machines. Fourthly, the integration of AM into existing structures is a key challenge to manufacturers. These requirements will be addressed by an approach based on the Industry 4.0 reference architecture.