An increasing demand to provide customised products creates challenges for manufacturing organisations. This poses a need to understand the characteristics required for manufacturing systems to handle customisation. In this study, 3D printing technology is assessed as an enabler for customisation. Additionally, the requirements of manufacturing systems with respect to configuration and control co-ordination are explored. A demonstrator is implemented to integrate 3D printing with conventional manufacturing, using an agent based distributed control system that co-ordinates the customisation of products and the order management.

This paper studies the impact of demand uncertainty and competition on a firms technology selection decision between Additive Manufacturing (AM) and conventional toolbased Dedicated Manufacturing (DM). The paper uses the gametheoretic approach presented in [57], and extends the model from 2 to n players making three sequential decisions under demand uncertainty: (i) choice of technology, (ii) capacity investment, and (iii) production quantities. We find that the conventional wisdom of choosing between flexible manufacturing technology and dedicated tool-based technology holds in the case of AM given there is no demand uncertainty. However, once we take the demand uncertainty into account, a game-theoretical analysis is essential to examine the profitability of switching manufacturing technologies to AM. The research will contribute towards a future empirical study and will help develop an industrially accessible decision support tool for the adoption of AM in a production environment.