3D Printing in Cloud Manufacturing: Model and Platform Design

Although 3D printing has attracted remarkable attention from both industry and academia society, still only a relatively small number of people have access to required 3D printers and know how to use them. One of the challenges is that how to fill the gap between the unbalanced supply of various 3D printing capabilities and the customized demands from geographically distributed customers. The integration of 3D printing into cloud manufacturing may promote the development of future smart networks of virtual 3D printing cloud, and allow a new service-oriented 3D printing business model to achieve mass customization. This paper presents a primary 3D printing cloud model and an advanced 3D printing cloud model, and analyzes the 3D printing service delivery paradigms in the models. Further, the paper proposes a 3D printing cloud platform architecture design to support the advanced model. The proposed advanced 3D printing cloud model as well as the architecture design can provide a reference for the development of various 3D printing clouds.