Utilising robotic process automation technologies for streamlining the additive manufacturing design workflow

This paper proposes a framework that utilises robotic process automation (RPA) technologies within the additive manufacturing (AM) design workflow to make the product development process more efficient. A commercial RPA platform is employed to create an automated workflow, which is capable of considering multiple AM process configurations. The main objective is to ensure that AM process cost and time requirements may be reliably calculated for any Computer-Aided Design (CAD) part model and multiple process configurations via simulation, with minimal human interaction. The proposed automated workflow was tested on a realistic case scenario and was compared against a standard conventional AM workflow. (c) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of CIRP. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Automated summary

This study proposes a framework that utilizes robotic process automation technology to improve the efficiency of additive manufacturing design workflow, reducing human intervention and accurately calculating the cost and time requirements of AM processes.