A Study on the Effects of Additive Manufacturing on the Structure of Supply Networks

With the ongoing development of additive manufacturing (AM) the technology has the potential to increase the efficiency of production processes or to replace classical subtractive production technologies. This will impact the structure of supply networks. In order to quantify this impact, this paper studies to what extend AM may influence a two stage supply network consisting of source nodes, production nodes and customer nodes. Three stylized instances of this model, which differ in the distribution of these nodes as well as the improvement of the resource efficiency through AM have been created. To study the impact of AM on the structure of supply networks, a computational study has been performed. Four indicators are used, i.e. the total costs, tonne-kilometres per customer on the second stage (production site to customer site), number of open production sites, and the proportion of transport costs on the first and the second stage are compared. All indicators improve by using AM and the production sites move closer to the customers.