A Hazard Analysis Technique for Additive Manufacturing

The promise of Additive Manufacturing (AM) includes reduced transportation and warehousing costs, reduction of source material waste, and reduced environmental impact. AM is extremely useful for making prototypes and has demonstrated the ability to manufacture complex parts not possible (or prohibitively expensive) with conventional machining. Scientists and manufactures are finding increased uses for AM in creation of all types of finished products including those built from polymers, biological material, and metals. Although companies such as GE have been using 3D printing for Additive Manufacturing for over thirty years to make mandrels for light bulb manufacturing, application areas of Additive Manufacturing have increased substantially in recent years, particularly due to the reduction in cost of 3D printers. Like most emergent technologies, there are bound to be growing pains with AM. This paper looks at the software that supports AM and 3D printing and their vulnerability to cyber-attacks, intellectual property theft, defect rates of AM software (which can cause undesired consequences themselves and also create vulnerabilities that a hacker may exploit), part reliability and safety of devices incorporating 3D printed parts (when making mission critical parts), and security/throughput issues of computer networks. Literature searches, consulting with technical experts and a relatively new hazard analysis technique will be used, one especially developed for software intensive systems called Systemic Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA). The purpose of this white paper is to identify risks (or hazards for mission critical parts) for AM in this emergent stage so that mitigations can be applied before accidents occur. A second purpose of this white paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of STPA as a hazard analysis technique in a field that is still relatively new.