3D printing technologies for enhancing the sustainability of an aircraft manufacturing or MRO company—a multi-expert partial consensus-FAHP analysis

The application of three-dimensional (3D) printing can enhance not only the competitiveness but also the sustainability of an aircraft manufacturing or maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) company. This study sought to identify the critical factors for such applications. Herein, first, the long-term opportunities and challenges facing an aircraft manufacturing or MRO company planning to apply 3D printing technologies are discussed. The critical factors for enhancing their sustainability are identified from the discussion results. The priorities of critical factors are usually ranked using the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP). However, existing FAHP methods cannot rank priorities reasonably when experts (or decision-makers) fail to reach an overall consensus. To address this problem, a novel partial consensus (PC)-FAHP approach is proposed that seeks to obtain a partial consensus among experts. After assessing the effectiveness of the proposed methodology with a case study involving three experts, the most critical factors were identified to be the long-term cost-effectiveness, number or types of aircraft parts that are or will be 3D printable, and advances in research and development that have been made already or are expected in the near future. In addition, the ranking result obtained using the PC-FAHP approach was different from that obtained using existing FAHP methods.