LAUSR

Recently, the rapid development of 3D printing technology and continuous breakthroughs in new material technology has increased the application of 3D printing in a wide range of fields, such as automobile industry, medical treatment, education, and food industry. Nowadays, several 3D printing companies use additive manufacturing (AM) to produce new product prototypes rapidly. For example, according to the Wohlers Report 2018, the global AM sector has grown at an annual average rate of 24.9% from 2013 to 2017, and the industry’s total value was $7.34-billion in 2017 [1]. 3D printing facilitates the automation of rapid prototyping and product customization. Compared with traditional production methods, manufacturing companies that use 3D printing technology for customized production must improve their flexibility and agility to meet the new challenges of intelligent manufacturing to the 3D printing industry. Lipson proposed that thousands of 3D printers with different characteristics would be similar to an ant factory: each manufacturing company like an ant, alone, by itself, may be small. However, like billions of ants with factories, the combined whole will be greater than the sum of its parts [2]. The fusion of cloud manufacturing and 3D printing will be a popular business model in the future, and from a design perspective, this fusion will promote innovation by reducing the threshold for designing. Thus, this study aims to build a 3D printing service platform to support users in experiencing manufacturing life cycle activities of 3D printing. Existing 3D printing business platforms, e.g., Shapeways and 3dhubs, do not cover the whole production life cycle. For example, in the existing 3D printing service platform, the 3D model has not yet formed an automated process from design to printing [3]. In short, the 3D printing production process of existing commercial platforms is not intelligent enough, and the transition between some processes needs to be completed manually. However, in this 3D printing service platform, by using servitization integration technology based on cloud computing, 3D printing product processing will be connected automatically in series. From a technical perspective, the 3D printing service platform has new functions and tools compared with existing commercial platforms, such as a 3D model generation tool, an equipment map, and an on-demand pricing tool. Therefore, this platform effectively integrates the entire production process (design, task scheduling, on-demand production, cloud inspection, and post-processing) of 3D printing products.