Abstract
Additive Manufacturing (AM) has become indispensable in the context of digitalization and Industry 4.0 and is said to be a mega trend of the 21st century. The technology offers immense opportunities to revolutionize the production of parts and components in all industries. Despite of the outstanding technical possibilities, the industry-wide adaptation rate is low. The current approach of looking at AM from a mostly technological view is a major reason for this. The challenge is to efficiently integrate 3D printing and other additive processes into existing manufacturing processes and systems. AM must be perceived as a multidimensional topic and viewed from different perspectives, two of which are the AM technology and the planning and management of production systems. These two perspectives have to be addressed simultaneously and cross-linked. In order to use AM to tackle some of the most challenging problems in modern manufacturing systems like increasing variant diversity, shorter product lifecycles, the demand for digitized processes and cyber-physical systems, it is necessary to develop interdisciplinary approaches and solutions, because none of the disciplines can reach the necessary performance and cost-efficiency alone.
Highlights
Additive Manufacturing (AM) has become indispensable in the context of digitalization and Industry 4.0 and is said to be a mega trend of the 21st century
AM must be perceived as a multidimensional topic and viewed from different perspectives, two of which are the AM technology and the planning and management of production systems
Amongst other developments companies have to deal with shorter product lifecycles, the customization/ individualization of their products as well as more product diversity and variants and thereby greater external and internal variance that lead to decreasing batch sizes and obliterate most long-term forecasts [1,2,3]
Summary
The flexibility and changeability of production systems are still becoming more and more important. Companies need to deal with these developments by becoming more performant and efficient and by reacting highly flexible In this regard, the production systems have to hold more and more options to shift volume on short notice and with little to no time to react. There are almost no standards that companies can fall back on regarding many of these technologies, nor is a valid number of successful showcases available as references All these developments and circumstances make clear that the concept of flexibility is a key factor for handling todays challenges of companies respectively their production systems. In this regard, a central question at this point is how to increase the flexibility in production systems quickly and on short notice
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