Performance Monitoring And Control For An Additive Manufacturing Factory - A Case Study In The Aerospace Industry

Additive Manufacturing (AM) is a promising technology that opens many new perspectives for design, logistics and production. A few state-of-the art industrial companies are beginning to industrialize this technology, i.e. shifting AM applications from prototyping to the production of end-user parts, and optimizing the production process under standard operational constraints. This shift requires to build and manage high-performance AM-based factories, yet few studies are available about the specificities of managing operations in such kind of contexts. Based on a case study with a leading company in the aerospace industry, we argue that the performance of such AM factories relies mainly on their ability to learn quickly how to control the quality of the parts that are produced and that this requires a customized information system. We then provide detailed descriptions of several operational issues AM factory managers and operators will have to face, as well as corresponding measures and metrics to control the learning process towards designing efficient solutions to these new constraints.