Big data plays an important role in the fourth industrial revolution, which requires engineersand computers to fully utilize data to make smart decisions to optimize industrial processes. In
the additive manufacturing (AM) industry, laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) and direct metal
laser solidification (DMLS) have been receiving increasing interest in research because of their
outstanding performance in producing mechanical parts with ultra-high precision and variable
geometries. However, due to the thermal and mechanical complexity of these processes, printing
failures are often encountered, resulting in defective parts and even destructive damage to the
printing platform. For example, heating anomalies can result in thermal and mechanical stress
on the building part and eventually lead to physical problems such as keyholing and lack of
fusion. Many of the aforementioned process errors occur during the layer-to-layer printing process,
which makes in-situ process monitoring and quality control extremely important. Although in-situ
sensors are extensively developed to investigate and record information from the real-time printing
process, the lack of efficient in-situ defect detection techniques specialized for AM processes
makes real-time process monitoring and data analysis extremely difficult. Therefore, to help
process engineers analyze sensor information and efficiently filter monitoring data for transport and storage, machine learning and data processing algorithms are often implemented. These algorithms
integrate the functionality of automated data processing, transferring, and analytics. In particular,
sensor data often takes the form of images, and thus, a prominent approach to conducting image
analytics is through the use of convolutional neural networks (CNN). Nevertheless, the industrial
utilization of machine learning methods often encounters problems such as limited and biased
training datasets. Hence, simulation methods, such as the finite-element method (FEM), are used
to augment and improve the training of the deep learning process monitoring algorithm.
Motivated by the above considerations, this dissertation presents the use of machine learning
techniques in process monitoring, data analytics, and data transfer for additive manufacturing
processes. The background, motivation, and organization of this dissertation are first presented
in the Introduction chapter. Then, the use of FEM to model and replicate in-situ sensor
data is presented, followed by the use of machine learning techniques to conduct real-time
process monitoring trained from a mixture of experimental and replicated sensor image data. In
particular, a cross-validation algorithm is developed through the exploitation of different sensor
advantages and is integrated into the machine learning-assisted process monitoring algorithm.
Next, an application of machine learning (ML) to non-image sensor data is presented as a neural
network model that is developed to estimate in-situ powder thickness to account for recoater arm
interactions. Subsequently, an integrated AM smart manufacturing framework is proposed which
connects the different manufacturing hierarchies, particularly at the local machine, factory, and
cloud level. Finally, in addition to the AM industry, the use of machine learning, specifically
neural networks, in model predictive control (MPC) for dynamic nonlinear processes is reviewed
and discussed.