Exploring Time and Power Requirement Trade-Offs in an Additive Manufacturing-Disrupted Production Cell

The introduction of additive manufacturing (AM) into modern production environments has provided new capabilities; however, these capabilities have disrupted manufacturing cells. The disruption of manufacturing through the addition of AM processes provides an opportunity to model a manufacturing cell, quantify the cells performance with respect to primary concerns, disrupt the cell, and lastly provide a qualitative analysis of the trade space between primary concerns. Using a previously developed cell model and convex optimization approach, the qualitative trade-offs between power and manufacturing time were explored. This trade-off analysis was then demonstrated using a realistic case study in which an existing cell was disrupted via the introduction of an additive manufacturing process with the requirement that the cell was not able to be re-designed or re-configured. The optimal machine settings for the original cell were used as the starting point for an adaptive optimization to recover as much performance as possible from the cell without changing the order, number, or types of machines other than the introduction of the AM process. The results offer a large number of important lessons related to the design of manufacturing cells, the design of products, and the possible decision variables for integrating AM into end-user manufacturing systems.