This page presents the basic concepts of the AM cost calculation, and gives in details the algorithm for calculation of production costs of the MJF technology and estimation of production costs that may be attributed to the individual products; the algorithm is developed during the A_MADAM project, and it may be used for comparison of production costs of different AM PBF technologies and selection of the optimal product design with respect to the production costs.

AM costs calculation does not represent design rule, but costs affect the decision-making process during the design or re-design of a product, and the concept of calculation of AM costs is different than the production costs of other technologies.

In principle, it is not possible even to estimate additive manufacturing production costs using the volume or mass of product. Besides, the complexity of the product shape does not influence additive manufacturing production costs. Therefore, while a lot of customers are expecting to have some estimation of prices based on prices of a unit volume of a product or of a unit mass of a product, further expecting that products with simple shapes will have smaller prices than the products of complex geometry - their expectations cannot be met.

The calculation of additive manufacturing production costs depends on the additive manufacturing technology that is used, because different approaches are used for calculations the costs of different technologies. Here is presented a method for calculation of the manufacturing costs of the powder-bed-fusion technologies, which are most frequently used for products of mechanical engineering