Production-Integrated Markings for Traceability of AM Parts in the Context of Industry 4.0

Traceability is often mentioned as one fundamental requirement to reach the vision of Industry 4.0, the next industrial revolution. As Additive Manufacturing (AM) is a technology with high relevance in the scope of Industry 4.0 this paper focuses on production-integrated markings for traceability of additively manufactured parts. Even industries that are not focusing on products with critical functionality using markings for quality management and liability exclusion can benefit a lot from identifiability of products. Markings can be understood as a kind of individualization of parts. As individualization does not increase production costs when using AM and the effort for integration of markings can be minimized by software in particular for high batch production, product marking should be an obligatory process step. This paper comprises various applications that can be achieved due to markings as well as different ways to embed a marking at least partly automatically.