Design De-Identification of Thermal History for Collaborative Process-Defect Modeling of Directed Energy Deposition Processes

There is an urgent need for developing collaborative process-defect modeling in metal-based additive manufacturing (AM). This mainly stems from the high volume of training data needed to develop reliable machine learning models for in-situ anomaly detection. The requirements for large data are especially challenging for small-to-medium manufacturers (SMMs), for whom collecting copious amounts of data is usually cost prohibitive. The objective of this research is to develop a secured data sharing mechanism for directed energy deposition (DED) based AM without disclosing product design information, facilitating secured data aggregation for collaborative modeling. However, one major obstacle is the privacy concerns that arise from data sharing, since AM process data contain confidential design information, such as the printing path. The proposed adaptive design de-identification for additive manufacturing (ADDAM) methodology integrates AM process knowledge into an adaptive de-identification procedure to mask the printing trajectory information in metal-based AM thermal history, which otherwise discloses substantial printing path information. This adaptive approach applies a flexible data privacy level to each thermal image based on its similarity with the other images, facilitating better data utility preservation while protecting data privacy. A real-world case study was used to validate the proposed method based on the fabrication of two cylindrical parts using a DED process. These results are expressed as a Pareto optimal solution, demonstrating significant improvements in privacy gain and minimal utility loss. The proposed method can facilitate privacy improvements of up to 30% with as little as 0% losses in dataset utility after de-identification.