Repository logo

Infoscience

  • English
  • French
Log In
Logo EPFL, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne

Infoscience

  • English
  • French
Log In
  1. Home
  2. Academic and Research Output
  3. Journal articles
  4. Benefiting from additive manufacturing for mass customization across the product life cycle
 
Loading...
Thumbnail Image
research article

Benefiting from additive manufacturing for mass customization across the product life cycle

Lacroix, Rachel  
•
Seifert, Ralf W.  
•
Timonina-Farkas, Anna  
January 1, 2021
Operations Research Perspectives

Additive manufacturing (AM) was initially designed for prototyping and product personalization, where high production quantities were not required. Now, it is also implemented for final part production to achieve cost-effective mass customization (MC). Thanks to its tool-less production and extreme flexibility, AM has the potential to address individual customer preferences with custom final parts. Nevertheless, despite its increased competitiveness, AM is not yet likely to replace traditional MC systems, but it can complement them, improving manufacturing efficiency. To broaden our understanding of how AM can complement traditional manufacturing systems, we develop an exploratory quantitative model. First, we leverage customer-centricity in a novel time-varying locational choice model of heterogeneous customers, coupling the Bass and the Hotelling-Lancaster models. Then, we investigate customer-centric marketing and operations decisions, exploring technology-switching scenarios that interchange AM with MC across the product life cycle (PLC). We formulate and solve an optimization problem by jointly deciding on technology-switching times, pricing, and product variety strategies to maximize a manufacturer's profit and meet individual customers' diverse and evolving needs. We use a validated Sample Average Approximation approach for the numerical solution of our non-convex optimization problem. Testing different pricing strategies, we show that decreasing and flexible trajectories are optimal. We derive analytical properties for the optimal pricing policy and demonstrate that a manufacturer can benefit from interchanging AM and MC across the PLC, in particular by adopting an AM-MC-AM scenario.

  • Details
  • Metrics
Type
research article
DOI
10.1016/j.orp.2021.100201
Web of Science ID

WOS:000710271100001

Author(s)
Lacroix, Rachel  
•
Seifert, Ralf W.  
•
Timonina-Farkas, Anna  
Date Issued

2021-01-01

Publisher

ELSEVIER

Published in
Operations Research Perspectives
Volume

8

Article Number

100201

Subjects

Operations Research & Management Science

•

additive manufacturing

•

mass customization

•

customer preference

•

switching time

•

pricing

•

diffusion

•

variety

•

inventory

Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
TOM  
Available on Infoscience
November 6, 2021
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/182768
Logo EPFL, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne
  • Contact
  • infoscience@epfl.ch

  • Follow us on Facebook
  • Follow us on Instagram
  • Follow us on LinkedIn
  • Follow us on X
  • Follow us on Youtube
AccessibilityLegal noticePrivacy policyCookie settingsEnd User AgreementGet helpFeedback

Infoscience is a service managed and provided by the Library and IT Services of EPFL. © EPFL, tous droits réservés