## 7 Conclusions  
This research presents an investigation into the process chains based on AM and CM manufacturing paths for the production of tooling, in particular multi-cavity mold inserts for plastic injection molding. A detailed technology and economic analysis was conducted to understand the impact of the choice. One of the main conclusions of this project is the renewed highlighted importance of keeping a holistic vision of the complete process chains, in order to give an objective evaluation, potentially also including the performance of the manufactured tools in their intended final application. As demonstrated in this research, often (but not always), manufacturing a mold insert additively may incur higher production costs, but such a higher initial cost is completely paid back by the enhanced final performance, in this case represented by the productivity of the tool in terms of injection molded plastic components within the same production time. The technological analysis demonstrated the production capabilities of the two streams, identifying the bottlenecks, and the results of the simulation showed how to potentially eliminate them (i.e., using newer AM machine with a higher number of lasers, adding more furnaces). The aim of this study was not to recommend one technology path over the other, but rather to analyze in detail both process chains. The analysis helped to highlight the relatively high importance of costs that are often neglected (such as the change in the cost of cutting tools due to wear). Here, it was demonstrated that they play a considerable part in the final cost. However, a challenge faced during this exploration was in the data collection itself, as some of the data used in the comparison came from the literature or, alternatively, from user experience. The quality and truthfulness of the comparison, when looking at a real factory environment, will increase if only historical quantitative data areused. Still, the relevance of the data highly depends on the level of digitalization of the considered factory. Potential future research on this field could start from a work similar to [32] to develop a tool specialized for mold components in order to (i) compare the CM and AM process chains, as well as to (ii) support the engineers in the selection of the best method for each tool component during the design of the injection mold. As a next investigation, it would be worth analyzing more in depth the design process and programming phase, which are executed at the computer, for preparing the design and the machines' programs to perform the job, as different types of software and skills level are required, and different levels of design complexities are involved for the two manufacturing flows. In the current work, the design approach for the AM and CM component was in fact the same. However, it has been demonstrated in previous research that, by adopting a design with the AM (DfAM) approach, a better trade-off between performance and manufacturing costs can be achieved [33]. Lastly, a final observation should be made in regard to the process technology maturity and the product complexities, whose considerations also represented a challenge of this investigation. AM- and CM-based process chains were compared in this analysis as if they were producing the exact same product. This was, however, not the case, as demonstrated by the final performance. The AM design could have been even further improved, for example, by topology optimization, as investigated in a similar case study by [PERSON] et al. in [34], to reduce weight and, consequently, the printing time. A similar investigation with a focus on the possible workflow to adopt for redesigning components to fully exploits the AM technology potential was conducted by [PERSON] et al. in [35]. In addition to topology optimization, another DfAM area that could be further investigated for application areas, such as injection molding, is the possibility of part consolidation. A design method to explore this area was proposed by [PERSON] et al.