Evaluating the Effectiveness of Designs for Low-Cost Digital Manufacturing Systems

There are many well-known systematic approaches to design the digital systems used in manufacturing. However, there are only a few approaches that specifically deal with low-cost components. Such components may not provide the same level of completeness as more expensive industrial alternatives and may need to be combined with other components to become comparable. Consequently, common design challenges for systems comprising such low-cost components revolve around extendability and interface standardisation. There is a need for analysing the capability of the existing approaches to design these systems. This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of designs for low-cost digital manufacturing systems that have been derived from a particular design approach. The proposed evaluation methodology is used for the special case of designs that are directly based on reference architectures and for the development of specific metrics for that purpose. To quantify the effectiveness, these metrics are applied to a number of design scenarios. Although focusing on reference-architecture-based designs, the proposed methodology can also be used for other design approaches. The evaluation and structured implementation comparison helps practitioners in selecting an effective design approach to low-cost digital manufacturing systems and provides insights into how a particular design approach can become more effective.