Application of Preference Selection Index (PSI) method for selecting a 3D printer

Abstract

3D Printing is increasingly used in many fields such as: Medicine and Dentistry, Aviation, Automation, Jewelry, Architecture, and Fashion, etc. To achieve high efficiency in printing process, the first well-thought-out step is choosing a 3D printer. There are many types of 3D printers manufactured by different brands on the 3D printer's market and each type has all the parameters (criteria) to evaluate is not the same. This makes for the customers very complicated and confused to select a 3D printer. This study applied a type of Multi-criteria Decision Making (MCDM) in machine selection, called Preference Selection Index (PSI). Six 3D printers from five different manufacturers were used including Creatbot DE plus, Flashforge Creator 3, Cubicon Style NEO A22C, Single Plus -320C, LulzBot TAZ Pro, and CraftBot Flow White IDEX. This article showed that Creatbot DE plus is the best choice, on the contrary, Cubicon Style NEO A22C is the worst selection. And then the orientation of selecting a 3D printer is also mentioned in the last part of this research.