Additive Manufacturing and PSS: a Solution Life-Cycle Perspective

Additive Manufacturing (AM) technologies disclose mass customisation and agile manufacturing, along with fully-digitised supply chains lowering the environmental impact. Concurrently, the progressive servitisation of products builds on new sustainable consumption paradigms, closer to the customer needs. The two mutually-enforcing subject matters are thus tightly intertwined in leveraging on custom-tailored, green and on-demand solutions. In this paper, we investigate the relation between AM and Product-Service Systems (PSS) according to different and interdependent categories pertaining to lifecycle, service orientation and customer proximity. We present a descriptive template that may facilitate – without demanding completeness – the individuation of common traits and patterns in AM-based services. This study represents a preliminary effort to systematise a cutting-edge technology with a PSS standpoint and to pave the way for future research.