Additive Manufacturing for Critical Infrastructure Resilience

Abstract

Critical infrastructure in low-resource and crisis-affected settings faces compounding threats from supply chain disruptions, geopolitical conflict, and natural disasters. When essential systems such as healthcare facilities, water networks, and energy grids are damaged or cut off from global supply chains, the absence of spare parts and local manufacturing capacity prolongs service failure and deepens humanitarian impact. Existing scholarship on additive manufacturing (AM) and supply chain resilience has largely examined these issues from a technical standpoint, leaving the socio-technical conditions of implementation in crisis-affected settings underexplored. This study contributes to the intersecting fields of critical infrastructure resilience, humanitarian logistics, and socio-technical systems research by examining AM not as a standalone technology, but as an intervention shaped by the social, institutional, and material conditions in which it operates. The study investigates how additive manufacturing functions as a socio-technical intervention to enhance the resilience of critical infrastructure during supply chain disruption in low-resource and crisis-affected settings, with a focus on Gaza and Syria. A qualitative research design was adopted, combining a literature review with eight semi-structured interviews conducted with practitioners drawn from three distinct stakeholder groups: community-level actors, NGO and humanitarian practitioners, and technology providers. The study examines which infrastructure sectors benefit most from AM, what technical and social factors enable or constrain its deployment, and how it relates to established resilience dimensions, interpreted through the Socio-Technical Systems (STS) framework and the 4Rs resilience lens (Robustness, Redundancy, Resourcefulness, Rapidity). The findings reveal that AM offers its strongest contributions in healthcare and water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) sectors, where small but essential components can halt entire service systems when unavailable. AM contributes most clearly to rapidity, by shortening response times through local production and digital file transfer, and to resourcefulness, by enabling iterative, context-specific problem-solving. Its contributions to redundancy and robustness are more conditional, depending on material quality, maintenance capacity, and sustained user trust. Across all sectors, implementation depends on the alignment of technical resources with social conditions including skills, coordination, and institutional support. The findings offer practical guidance for humanitarian organizations and policymakers seeking to integrate AM into crisis preparedness and infrastructure recovery