In military operations, asset availability, or vehicle readiness, is critical for a mission’s success. In order to maintain high asset availability, it is important to keep sufficiently high stocks of spare parts and/or keep supply lead times of those parts short, since the demand for spare parts is uncertain and occurs instantly. Additive manufacturing (AM) can support in this respect with the availability of printed spare parts. For the integration of AM in military supply chains there are several questions to answer, such as where to locate AM in a multi-echelon supply chain, whether to use printed parts as temporary fixes or permanent replacements, which type of AM capability should be used or which products should be printed. My research aims to find answers to the questions of whether and how to integrate AM capabilities into the military supply chain.
