A production scheduling case study solved for Electron Beam Powder Bed Fusion

Additive Manufacturing (AM) represents a pillar of the modern industrial revolution. Its peculiar characteristics make AM largely differ from conventional manufacturing; thus, the approach to the production planning and control must change and be adapted to such technology. While for conventional manufacturing nesting and scheduling decisions are taken at different planning stages, they are both made in daily operations when AM technology is considered. This paper proposes a case study applied to the powder bed fusion process with electron beam (PBF-EB) and involving the problem of scheduling parts in a distributed production system composed of many parallel identical facilities. According to the typical PBF-EB production stages, each facility also has a second stage for cleaning and support removal operations, and only a subset of facilities has a third stage for surface finishing and post-heat treatments. In the case study, the scheduling problem is solved by a proposed genetic algorithm to minimize the makespan.