Johannes Erbel

With the rise of modern technology, we arrived at a fourth industrial revolution that relies on automation, rapidity and individuality. In this regard, additive manufacturing (AM) has become indispensable when it comes to quick prototypes or manufacturing highly customized products. With AM, nearly any kind of 3D objects can be brought to life by incrementally layering metals or polymers on top of each other. As the machine instructions are too complex to be implemented manually, the processes involved when 3D printing objects heavily rely on software solutions. However, even with the existing software solutions, users are confronted with loads of parameters that can be used to tune the printing process, with printing errors often to be observed. My interest is to increase the internal and external quality of developed software as well as AM manufactured "hardware" by exploring the extent to which software engineering practices can be applied to the AM domain.