Matching Supply and Demand in Collaborative Additive Manufacturing

Abstract

Due to an increasing individualization of products, additive manufacturing is often seen as a solution to cater for more sophisticated customer requirements. In order to fulfill customer needs, manufacturers have to rely on collaboration to distribute risk and improve the utilization of their resources. In this paper, we used qualitative interviews to define requirements for a marketplace that allows the automatic exchange of additive manufacturing capacities. From these requirements, we derived a conceptual model that matches orders to sales offers while taking specific product requirements, such as quality, into account. Additionally, we implemented a demonstrator to evaluate the model with potential buyers and sellers of additive manufacturing capacities. Our research showed that most requirements could be implemented in a marketplace. However, we could show specific limitations for particular requirements.