Reducing resupply time with additive manufacturing in spare part supply chain

Recently, Additive Manufacturing (AM) has started to be considered as an alternative to Conventional Manufacturing (CM) in the spare part production, due to the negligible set-up times that AM has with respect to CM and the possibility of producing small batches. However, AM production times are usually larger than those of CM, making the choice between them not as obvious as it may seem. In this paper, the impact of AM is studied in a single-echelon supply chain under the assumption of infinite production capacity of the production facility and (S-1, S) inventory policy. Results are obtained by using analytical Markov Chain models.