A Common Data Dictionary and Common Data Model for Additive Manufacturing

Additive manufacturing (AM) leverages emerging technologies and well-adopted processes to produce near-net-shape products. The advancement of AM technology requires data management tools to collect, store, and share information through the product development lifecycle and across the material and machine value chain. To address the need for sharing data among AM developers and practitioners, an AM common data dictionary (AM-CDD) was first developed based on community consensus to provide a common lexicon for AM, and later standardized by ASTM International. Following the AM-CDD work, the development of a common data model (AM-CDM) defining the structure and relationships of the key concepts, and terms in the AM-CDD is being developed. These efforts have greatly facilitated system integrations and AM data exchanges among various organizations. This work outlines the effort to create the AM-CDD and AM-CDM, with a focus on the design of the AM-CDM. Two use cases are provided to demonstrate the adoption of these efforts and the interoperability enabled by the AM-CDM for different engineering applications managed by different types of database technology. In these case studies, the AM-CDM is implemented in two distinct formats to curate AM data from NIST—the first in XML from their additive manufacturing material database and the second in OWL from their 2022 AM bench database. These use cases present the power of the AM-CDM for data representation, querying, and seamless data exchange. Our implementation experiences and some challenges are highlighted that can assist others in future adoptions of the AM-CDM for data integration and data exchange applications.