Systems Engineering in the Fourth Industrial Revolution

12Recent Advances Toward the Industrialization of Metal Additive Manufacturing

Federico Mazzucato Oliver Avram Anna Valente and Emanuele Carpanzano

Synopsis

The times when additive manufacturing (AM) technologies were struggling against product complexity and manufacturability are over; additive manufacturing has indeed proven its benefits several industries and use cases, while research has widely invested in consolidating the opportunities envisaged years ago, also opening the door to bringing manufacturing into the digital era. Reports of successful industrial cases are increasing at a fast pace as an ever‐growing number of companies are getting significant advantages from AM technologies by reducing production cost, material waste, and time‐to‐market. Nevertheless, open challenges and unresolved issues are still clouding the decision making process of a great number of industrial players in the favor of adopting additive technologies, regardless of their undeniable advantages and opportunities. An effective achievement of cutting‐edge results in the field of AM will rely upon a larger scale pipeline aiming at comprehensively boosting the smart factory paradigm. Our research analysis on recent manufacturing trends motivates a framework that captures highly relevant activities to support AM technologies' move toward mass manufacturing. In this perspective this chapter has its onset on the quest of answers to the fundamental question of how to use digital technology to improve ...