Additive manufacturing (AM) is becoming increasingly popular because of its unique advantages. However, AM still suffers from support material waste during the fabrication process when overhanging features exist. Plenty of research has been carried out for minimising support usage. However, former studies only focused on the optimisation for a single part fabrication. In this paper, a four-step strategy of multi-part production for reducing support consumption in AM is proposed. When printing a group of parts in the same build vat or chamber, the proposed strategy optimises the print orientation for each part, combines every two parts based on the geometries, proposes several possible multi-part combinations, and then selects the optimal part positions for fabrication. Two case studies are carried out for verification. The results show that the four-step strategy can significantly reduce the support waste and total fabrication time.

增材制造（AM）由于其独特的优势而变得越来越受欢迎。然而，当存在悬垂特征时，AM在制造过程中仍然遭受支撑材料浪费。为了减少支持使用，已经进行了大量研究。但是，以前的研究仅集中于单个零件制造的优化。本文提出了一种四步多零件生产策略，以减少增材制造中的支撑消耗。当在同一构建桶或腔室中打印一组零件时，所提出的策略优化了每个零件的打印方向，根据几何形状将每两个零件合并，提出了几种可能的多零件组合，然后选择最佳零件位置制造。进行了两个案例研究以进行验证。