An Event-Driven Software Architecture for Process Analysis in Additive Manufacturing

Abstract

Additive Manufacturing is still not commonly accepted as a considerable manufacturing process for serial products. Build rate and cost estimation or even the traceability of parts concerning Quality Management issues is weak. That's also because of the unavailability of adequate software solutions. Self-made solutions with Spreadsheets are often hard to adapt and inflexible in usage. This paper presents a distributed event-driven software architecture for cost assessment and traceability from powder to finished products. Further the approach of event-driven processing for cost calculation following the activity based costing methodology is discussed. The methodology considers arbitrary events (e.g. machine data or market prices) that may have an effect for a more detailed process analysis.