Incremental Manufacturing: Process Planning for a Scalable Production

Abstract

Industry faces the market demand towards individualized and functionalized products, which challenges traditional linear linked manufacturing. To overcome limitations of current production concepts the authors presented in previous works the manufacturing concept called Incremental Manufacturing (IM). IM is a hybrid-manufacturing concept where standardized base parts are produced first, then assembled and finalized by additive and subtractive manufacturing steps. This tool free concept can help to reduce machine and equipment investment costs and enables a scalable production concerning batch size, material, process and product spectrum of multi-material parts. Furthermore, this concept affects a design method with minor restrictions with regard to production and a process planning with flexible manufacturing sequences. These new possibilities result in a high degree of freedom in both disciplines, which must be used purposefully and should be restricted in a manageable way. For this purpose, part design and process planning must be interlinked in an early manufacturing planning stage. This paper presents an approach for evaluating different production routes of an IM-designed part based on Inter-process interactions and manufacturing key figures.