5. Conclusions

In this chapter, an attempt to analyze and categorize such themes related to the production issues of the AM technology was done. AM technology began becoming an industrial solution recently, and so it was recognized as an interesting theme with a possibility to deepen the research area if this technology achieved a good level of maturity in terms of mechanical resistance characteristics and tolerances achievable. After the first step analysis, the state of the researches about the operations management field was analyzed and investigated.

This chapter defines a precise way for the literature review, and it analyzes and categorizes several papers with the method introduced before.

From the literature analysis conducted, it was quite clear that from a technological and from a production quality level (measured from the capability to achieve such levels of geometrical and dimensional tolerances) not so many issues are open and so it is possible to conclude that the AM is quite ready to be brought in the industrial context, given some adjustment still needed about the processes to avoid the porosity problems for the parts worked with the AM technology and to achieve some geometrical tolerance as the concentricity and circularity. Therefore, the pieces in a metal can be realized directly using the AM technology, having a good level of reliability of the part, when it is under mechanical stress. Moreover, the parts realized in this way are good in terms of tolerances achievable, limiting the need of mechanical post-processing activities.

Starting from this result in this paper it was investigated if a scientific literature lacks on the possibilities of the AM to be a production technology in the industrial world exists or not. In fact, to make real the possibility to effectively bring this technology in the production context, it is required that the AM becomes more and more a theme studied and known from the operations management point of view, also offering the possibility to be measured in a production context. In fact, the technology is evolving, and the need to understand the production management issue is becoming a need. Therefore, it is possible to say that if from the point of view of the mechanical tolerances and properties a lot of work was performed and good results are available not the same can be said from the management point of view. Therefore, this state of the art can individuate as the first point of study an important issue about the methods to measure the process costs when an AM technology is used to produce an item.

Moreover, as argued in the previous paragraph, the management theme seems to be affected from a very important absence. Many authors have begun to study the management issues related to the general systems; however, nobody recognizes a main limit in the actual knowledge level.

Therefore, in this chapter, it was presented a cost allocation model that fits the requirements of this new technology and also a mathematical formulation for the scheduling problem of a single AM machine is presented.
