Abstract
Additive manufacturing (AM), or popular scientific 3D printing, disseminates in more and more production processes. This changes not only production processes themselves, e.g. by replacing subtractive production technologies, but AM will in all likelihood also impact the configuration of supply networks. Due to a more efficient use of raw materials, transportation relations may change and production sites may be relocated. How this change will look like is part of an ongoing discussion in industry and academia. However, quantitative studies on this question are scarce. In order to quantify the potential impact of AM on a two-stage supply network, we use a facility location model. The impact of AM on the production process is integrated into the model by varying resource efficiency ratios. We create a test data set of 700 instances. Features of this data set are, among others, different geographical clusters of source nodes, production nodes, and customer nodes. By means of a computational study, the impact of AM on the supply network structure is measured by four indicators. In the context of our experimental set-up, AM reduces the overall transportation costs of a supply network compared to subtractive production. However, the share of the transportation costs on the second stage of a supply network in the total costs increases significantly. Therefore, supply networks in which production sites and customer sites are closely spaced improve their cost-effectiveness stronger than other regional configurations of supply networks.
Highlights
Due to the technological enhancement of additive manufacturing (AM) over the past years, Additive manufacturing (AM) starts to replace subtractive production technologies
If one production technology is replaced by another, this can change production and logistics processes as well. Still it appears that the focus in research is on improving the actual AM production technology, industry and academia are aware of possible broader implications of AM, e.g. on supply networks
The first-stage transportation costs between source nodes and production sites are not considered because a lower buy-to-fly ratio requires less raw materials which obviously reduces the first-stage transportation cost
Summary
Due to the technological enhancement of additive manufacturing (AM) over the past years, AM starts to replace subtractive production technologies. If one production technology is replaced by another, this can change production and logistics processes as well. Still it appears that the focus in research is on improving the actual AM production technology, industry and academia are aware of possible broader implications of AM, e.g. on supply networks. Potential implications of AM on supply networks are discussed. We are not aware of study that measures impacts of AM on supply networks and quantifies these effects.
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