Introduction

Additive manufacturing is an attractive advance in manufacturing technology, because it opens the possibility to manufacture shapes not achievable by other methods (Milewski, 2017), as well as offers operational flexibility and reduced production time (Peng et al., 2021). Particularly, the 3D printing of metals allows making complex, durable, custom parts. A key advantage of additive manufacturing is that there are very few or no geometric restrictions. Also, small batches are possible. This facilitates mass customization, i.e. makes it feasible to produce long-tail items.