On demand printing with Additive Manufacturing (AM) for spare parts: scenarios for the insourcing of a 3D Printer

Additive Manufacturing (AM) has become a promising technique for spare parts management. The reduced lead time of AM compared to Classical Manufacturing (CM) has attracted the interest of researchers and many applications of AM to spare parts management have been introduced in the literature. However, the high production and equipment costs obscure the advantages of AM to spare parts management to practitioners and academics. The recent literature on spare parts management with AM have two main limitations which we address in this work. The first is that AM spare parts are mistakenly assumed to be less reliable than CM ones, which has been refuted by the recent literature on the mechanical characteristics of AM parts. Secondly, the external supply of AM parts that excludes the investment cost of the equipment. Our model overcomes these limitations by taking into account a spare part installed on a fleet of systems which failures are based on failure data from recent literature. In addition, we consider an insourced 3D printer, and account for the purchasing cost. We propose several scenarios for the insourcing of a 3D printing, considering a future cost reduction and constrained stock systems, individuating constrained stock system with high lead times for the CM part, ideal for in-house printing. The work has been supported by the project SUPERCRAFT, funded by the Emilia-Romagna Region (Italy) with European funds (POR FESR).