# A Social Life Cycle Assessment Framework for Additive Manufacturing Products
## 5 Research Implications, Limitations, and Future Directions  
To date, there are still very few published works regarding the social impacts of AM technology, and this research is among the first. The proposed framework can be perceived as an elementary step in measuring the social impacts of an AM product from a life cycle perspective. With the application of the proposed framework in a case study, it will be possible to identify the positive and negative social impacts associated with an AM product. The scoring system of the proposed framework would allow organizations to identify negative social impacts throughout the value chain of an AM product (at different levels of assessment), and subsequently, find alternatives/solutions to address them. The provided cut-off scores by the framework allow for the identification of hotspots within each life cycle stage that enables organizations to concentrate their efforts on finding specific measures and solutions. Furthermore, it will be possible to understand which stakeholders are most likely to be affected and which life cycle stages will have the most critical social performance.  
Due to the pilot nature of this study regarding AM technology and its social impacts, a set of limitations was found during the research, namely, the stakeholders addressed in the framework were solely those mentioned in the UNEP/SETAC guidelines. It is possible that more stakeholders could be affected by the social impacts of an AM product. Additionally, the framework needs further validation from specialists in the field so it can be applied in real case studies.  
The proposed framework in this research is expected to provide a solid foundation for future work. The proposals for future work are:  
* Validating the applicability of the framework through various case studies in several AM companies engaged in different industries (e.g., biomedical, automotive, aeronautical [38], etc.), since they have different preferred production processes, quality restrictions, and cost models, where it is also possible to collect the necessary data for measuring the proposed indicators.
* Validating the proposed framework with different types of AM processes, since the social impacts may be different for each type of AM process.
* Examining the framework for conventional manufacturing processes (e.g., machining, and comparing the results with an AM scenario to study the differences between social impacts in contrasting manufacturing settings).
* Assigning different weights to the indicators, stakeholders, and life cycle stages according to their relevance/importance in the context of AM (e.g., using fuzzy logic).
* Exploring in detail which stakeholders are affected in each life cycle stage of the AM product.
* Including other possible stakeholder categories and subcategories based on their relevance to AM technology social impacts.
* Studying the feasibility of applying the proposed framework simultaneously with E-LCA and LCC methodologies regarding a specific AM product. This way, it may be possible to comprehensively investigate and measure the social, environmental, and economic impacts of an AM product.
* Exploring, within the framework, other AM social impacts and their connections with stakeholders and their respective subcategories.
* Validating the applicability of the social indicators used in the proposed framework and exploring more indicators specific to the context of AM technology.
* Assessing the final results when the framework is applied by different analysts to the same case study under the same conditions (i.e., the extent to which different analysts reach the same results).