Open Access

Tobias Schröer, Sören Münker, Jan Reschke

• We propose an integrated cost-benefit model to evaluate the economic utility of Additive Manufacturing (AM) for specific business cases. The high flexibility of AM enables novel product design possibilities and new production systems paradigms. However, in most cases AM-technologies still cannot compete with conventional mass production technologies in terms of production costs. A fundamental reason is that the benefits of AM are not considered by simple evaluation of production costs. Hence, practitioners need a holistic approach to consider costs and benefits of AM simultaneously in order to determine AM business cases. An easy to use model supports the user in identifying the relevant benefits for a specific use case and consider the added value in a cost model. The result is an interactive graph that helps users to explore new benefits and unlock their potential. The benefits are integrated into a cost model to allow a holistic quantitative evaluation of the business case. Our interactive approach based on the cytoscape graph framework helps identifying the key impact factors of the business case and makes it easy to run scenario-based analyses.