Batch delivery considerations in additive manufacturing machine scheduling problem

Abstract

As a disruptive technology, additive manufacturing (AM) is attracting both researchers and practitioners thanks to its manufacturing ability. Several AM technologies have been developed based on the needs of the industry to fabricate parts through different materials, such as polymers, ceramics and metals. Having a powder-bed fusion AM process, Selective Laser Melting (SLM) enables the direct production of highly customized complex geometries in high-quality lightweight metals. This study focuses on the scheduling of multiple SLM machines to produce part orders received from geographically dispersed customers. Each order may contain more than one part, which may be processed in any batch on any suitable machine. However, the delivery of an order requires that all individual part orders received from the same customer have been completed, to minimize delivery costs. Although there is limited research on multiple AM machine scheduling problems in the literature, none of them considered batch delivery. Following the detailed description of the problem, a genetic algorithm (GA) approach has been proposed to solve a numerical example and the results are presented.