Abstract
To increase a 3D printer's throughput and decrease the print objects' lead times, composing good batches for 3D printers in high-volume 3D printing environments is of great importance. Since manual planners cannot oversee the whole production planning, they tend to make sub-optimal decisions. This paper presents a two-stage procedure that automatically generates batches for multiple 3D printers. The first stage consists of allocating objects to a batch. This problem is an extension of the classical one-dimensional bin packing problem by including lateness and object size mixture requirements. In the second stage, the positions of the print objects in a tray are determined by using third party three-dimensional packing software. By simulating the production planning of Shapeways, a popular 3D printing marketplace, model parameters are calibrated and the performance of the two-stage procedure is evaluated. The results show an increase of the throughput of the 3D-printers by approximately 10% in comparison with manually created batches.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | WSC '15 Proceedings of the 2015 Winter Simulation Conference |
| Editors | L. Yilmaz, W.K.V. Chan, I. Moon, T.M.K. Roeder, C. Macal, M.D. Rossetti |
| Place of Publication | Piscataway |
| Publisher | Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers |
| Pages | 2136-2147 |
| Number of pages | 12 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 978-1-4673-9741-4 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2015 |