An Approach toward Estimating Cost of a New System in the Conceptual Design Stage using Knowledge-Base

Abstract

To estimate profitability of a new system in the conceptual design stage, engineers need to estimate the cost of concept (the cost of the final system developed from each system concept). If engineers have abundant experiences developing similar systems, they can construct a knowledge-base consisting of historical cost data and use it to estimate the cost of concept. However, if the firm is entering a new market, engineers do not have historical cost data to accurately estimate the cost of concept. In this case, engineers need to benchmark similar systems in the marketplace and construct a knowledge-base with the benchmarked information. This paper proposes an approach toward developing a distribution (belief) about the cost of concept using a knowledge-base. The proposed approach retrieves a subset of information from the knowledgebase relevant to estimating the cost of concept, constructs a histogram about the cost of concept, and develops a distribution of the cost of concept. This paper demonstrates the proposed approach by using printers as an illustrative example.

Meeting Name

ASME 2007 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, IDETC2007 (2007: Sep. 4-7, Las Vegas, NV)

Department(s)

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Keywords and Phrases

Benchmarking; Clustering; Concept; Distribution; System; Cost

Document Type

Article - Conference proceedings

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2007 American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), All rights reserved.

Publication Date

07 Sep 2007

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