A proposal of manufacturing execution system integration in design for additive manufacturing

Abstract

The deployment of Additive Manufacturing processes had a rapid and broad increase in the last years, and the same trend is expected to hold in the near future. A way to better exploit the advantages of such technology is the use of Design for Additive Manufacturing (DFAM), a set of methods and tools helpful to design a product and its manufacturing process taking into account AM specificities from the early design stages. However, until now DFAM has not received feedback information from the shop-floor additive machines. To overcome this information lack, we present in this paper an integration between DFAM and a Manufacturing Execution System (MES), an information framework able to real-time acquire, analyze and synthesize process and product data. The MES-DFAM cooperation allows to improve product quality and process performance, and to better deal with possible criticalities, both in the prototyping and in the mass production phases.