An Environmental Decision Support System for Determining On-site or Off-site Additive Manufacturing of Spare Parts

Abstract

Effective spare part management can increase the competitiveness of supply chains, but the intrinsic characteristics of spare parts (e.g., intermittent demands, dependence on suppliers) make their effective management complicated. In recent years, additive manufacturing (AM) has emerged as a possible way to overcome these issues and received significant research attention, especially the topic of supply chain configuration. AM enables the easy production of parts close to the point of use, thus favoring the decentralization of supply chains (i.e., on-site production), but while this topic has been studied extensively from an economic perspective, its environmental implications remain unexplored. The literature is limited merely to mentions of the reduced transportation emissions associated with on-site production strategies, without, for example, a lifecycle perspective in which the production phase is considered. It is common knowledge that different countries adopt different energy mixes, thus generating different carbon dioxide–equivalent emissions during the production phase. A lifecycle perspective therefore casts doubt on whether on-site production strategies are always environmentally preferable over strategies in which spare parts are produced far from the point of use and then shipped (i.e., off-site production or centralized supply chains). In this paper, we aim to resolve this doubt by developing a decision-support system that can assist managers and practitioners in determining the most environmentally friendly AM spare part production strategy, considering both the transportation and production phases.