The Impact of Design Complexity on Additive Manufacturing Performance

Complexity in a manufacturing system can lead to unnecessary costs due to an increase in manufacturing uncertainty that negatively affects the reliability and controllability of the system. Despite the importance of understanding complexity in manufacturing, the conceptualization of complexity for an additive manufacturing (AM) system and its impact on operational performance have not been clearly articulated in the literature. As a response, this study characterizes a complexity measure relevant to AM and identifies the impact of the complexity on operational performance in an AM system. For this, design complexity for AM is defined by considering both the volume ratio and area ratio of a part design. Then, a virtual AM plant for aircraft parts is built by a discrete event simulation to derive the average order lead time of each part design. A linear regression analysis is performed to understand the impact of the calculated design complexity on the AM performance. As a result, this study shows that design complexity negatively affects the average order lead time of the AM system. The findings from this study indicate that the design aspects of complexity for an AM based system should be properly managed to improve its operational performance.