Artificial intelligence enabled analytic hierarchy process based modeling for computing complexity for additive manufacturing
摘要
Accurate assessment of part complexity in Additive Manufacturing (AM) is critical for design for AM, cost estimation, and risk mitigation; however, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) methods currently in use are slow, subjective, and not realistic at an industrial scale. We present an AHP-informed AI framework that can learn to replicate expert AHP scoring using supervised machine learning. A dataset of 100 parts from two different real-world systems was compiled from expert-scored AHP notebooks and then trained on multi-modal descriptions of each part to predict complexity. The Random Forest Regressor model successfully established good predictive fidelity on hold-out parts (R2 = 0.897; MAE = 8.533; RMSE = 10.519, expressed in native AHP-score units), that was a significant improvement on baseline regressors. Feature-importance analysis indicated agreement with hierarchy criteria maintained by human experts, as well as robustness to empty values and unseen mode categories. A deployable desktop application operationalizing the pipeline was developed that enables engineers to obtain predictions in milliseconds or lower timeframes and reduces the time to evaluate a part by more than 99% compared to manually scoring the part. There remains a gap connecting structured expert judgment with evidence-based inference; we have piloted a scalable, interpretable, and deployable technology for specifying part complexity in AM workflows.