Design and Development of a Distributed Software Platform for Additive Manufacturing

Over the last years, Industry 4.0 has set a trend towards a new era of manufacturing. Additive Manufacturing (AM) is a cornerstone of the fourth industrial revolution. It is a technology expected to transform production in nearly every industry. Nonetheless, there are still several production hurdles limiting its widespread adoption, such as process reliability and repeatability. Advanced analytics, which required data, are necessary to overcome these limiting factors. During the AM pipeline, a vast amount of information is generated. To store and manage all this data, the purpose of this thesis is the design and development of a management framework, the first of its type, that allows the collection, storage, analysis, and link of this data, supporting all the steps of the additive manufacturing process from CAD development to 3D print. The platform is an extension and customization of an open-source IoT platform and it implements a microservices design pattern to enable system flexibility and scalability, with discrete services providing specific functionalities that can be developed, deployed, and scaled separately. The platform supports different communication protocols and provides APIs that enable the communication as well as the integration of new functionalities. The platform integrates a service that, through the use of machine learning algorithms, tackles the specific problem of detecting powder bed defects with image analysis, a technology expected to increase process repeatability and have significant impacts on time and cost savings. A rich user interface has been developed with the collaboration of Stellantis to provide users with an intuitive way to exploit the platform functionalities. Among the functionalities it is possible to: manage users, printers, and jobs; visualize, explore, download data; load additional data, execute defect analysis, and choose the best visualization for the obtained results. There are still many features that can be incorporated to expand and improve the platform's capabilities.