Abstract
Additive Manufacturing (AM), better known as 3D-Printing, is a rapidly developing technology that is spreading all over the world and with its diffusion the number of methodologies to carry it out is increasing. In this period, we have come up with technologies capable of printing spare parts also in metal and this is a greedy opportunity for maintenance. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate models of Age Based Preventive Maintenance Policies based on the use of alternative spare parts to the "Regular" provided by the OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) that are made with different printing technologies to avoid long downtime of the system during the lead time for the supply of traditional spare parts, which can be very long; however avoiding to keep them in stock since the high cost of these items.
Obviously the different types of printed products have different survival times, different lead time and different purchasing cost that the model considers in the evaluation of the best Preventive Maintenance Policy among the ones developed in this work: we investigate the convenience of using a maintenance policy with two AM options on demand with no stock compared to a maintenance policy with one print option on demand with no stock and a traditional maintenance policy where we have always a regular version of the component in stock; this in order to allow a company to choose the lowest cost policy for every replacement using all the technology currently available.
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