A new perspective for production process analysis using additive manufacturing—complexity vs production volume

Since the early days of industrial manufacturing, decisions like the analysis of economic or financial break even and the determination of optimal production level and similar problems were taken using the number of parts as the main decision driver. While in the last years the manufacturing community was simply observing the evolutions of the additive manufacturing (AM) technology, nowadays it is changing its perspective to be a player of this revolution. Since AM has become feasible and applicable to the industrial manufacturing, as reported in Fera et al. (Cogent Eng 3(1):1261503, 2016) and Costabile et al. (Int J Ind Eng Comput 8(2):263–282, 2017), the industrial world is now calling for innovative methods for the integration of this new technology operations management in traditional production systems. The aim of this paper is to present a novel approach to classify and analyze the production of specific products using AM or subtractive manufacturing (SM), using complexity as a decision driver and not the number of products to manufacture. The effectiveness of the method is tested on a data set built for this scope.