Grouping parts for multiple parts production in Additive Manufacturing

Rapid prototyping (RP) has evolved to Additive Manufacturing (AM) in recent years. It can produce functional or end-use parts with small or even medium quantities. And further, due to its unique layer-by-layer construction principle, it can produce different parts at the same time in a same AM machine. To improve the productivity and machine utilization of AM processes under multiple parts production context, this paper propose the conception of 'Grouping parts'. Based on the Group Technology (GT) used in traditional processing technologies, a modified Group Technology for AM under multiple parts manufacturing context is presented. To group parts, a set of key attributes affecting the AM production time, cost, quality and work preparation are identified to represent the parts, and then a Grey Clustering method is adopted to conduct the similarity analysis. A simple case study is presented in the end to illustrate the proposed conception and its methodology. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V.