Intelligent additive manufacturing and design: state of the art and future perspectives

In additive manufacturing (AM), intelligent technologies are proving to be a powerful tool for facilitating economic, efficient, and effective decision-making within the product and service development. Such capabilities hold great promise to significantly improve the producibility, repeatability, and reproducibility of the additive manufacturing process and unlock its complete design freedom for product innovation. This paper defines the concept of intelligent additive manufacturing and design (IAMD) while providing a triple-layer model for reference. Details about these three layers, i.e., digital thread layer, cyber-physical layer, and intelligent service layer, are presented. Moreover, both scientific and engineering challenges raised during the studies and implementations of IAMD are discussed together with potential solutions. The paper also outlines the future perspective on IAMD towards the directions of integrated design and manufacturing, cyber-physical AM, advanced artificial intelligence for AM, digital materials and products, as well as design for AM process chain.