Towards Annotations and Product Definitions for Additive Manufacturing

As Additive Manufacturing (AM) is viewed more and more as a production-capable technology, data and information needs have made the costs of AM complexity increasingly apparent. Techniques available in current GD&T practices do not fully support product definitions needs in additive manufacturing. The fully model-driven process introduces new intricacies and complexities that must be addressed to facilitate the reproducibility of AM parts. Machine-readability needs must trump human interpretation requirements. In this paper, we discuss the future directions of GD&T and semantic annotations as they relate to satisfying AM product definition requirements.