Proceedings of the 38 th International Conference in Computer and Industrial Engineering, CIE2008, Beijing, China, Vol.3, Pages 2119-2128, 31 st October-2 nd November 2008 THROUGH LIFE COSTING IN ELECTRONIC DEFENCE SYSTEMS: AN INTEGRATED DATA-DRIVEN MULTI-LEVEL APPROACH Wai Cheung Department of Mechanical Engineering University of Bath UK w.m.cheung@bath.ac.uk Linda Newnes Antony Mileham Department of Mechanical Engineering University of Bath UK {l.b.newnes, a.r.mileham}@bath.ac.uk Robert Marsh John Lanham Faculty of Computing, Engineering and Mathematical Sciences University of the West of England UK {r.marsh, j.d.lanham}@uwe.ac.uk ABSTRACT Cost estimating is a business process that is critical to the defence sector, where many products have low volumes and long life cycles. The nature of a defence system is often unique (for example, a naval platform) which consists of a number of sub-systems and components. For the design of such a system cost estimating is a critical task, in particular the requirement to predict the cost throughout the system’s lifetime. The aim of this paper therefore is to discuss an integrated approach that provides a general framework for through life costing in defence systems via the development of: (1) a generic data library to support designers and cost estimators, (2) data searching and transfer mechanisms to support a top-down and bottom-up hybrid cost modelling approach, (3) capturing reliability data to support product services. The paper is divided into several sections, first, a review of relevant research projects concerning integration and data capture for cost modelling. This is followed by a section, which highlights problems of performing cost estimates for low volume products, and subsequently the proposed solution, methods of cost estimation and example applications. Perhaps most importantly, the methods created in this research are able to enhance decision-making and accelerate the responsiveness of the business bidding process. KEYWORDS Cost Estimating, Through Life Costing, Defence Systems, Data-driven, Integrated Cost Modelling 1. INTRODUCTION The achievement of the Japanese manufacturing techniques such as ‘lean’ and ‘just-in-time’ to reduce product development cycle time inspired the development of ‘concurrent engineering’ (CE) in the late 1980s. With the success of CE and the need of product development collaboration and distribution, a buzzword emerged and this was termed ‘integration’ (Cheung, W.M., et al., 2007a), (Gao, J.X., et al., 2003). Integration has been a subject of numerous research efforts since the late 1990s. However, in product development, integration techniques were predominantly applied to the development of enterprise systems such as Product Lifecycle Management and Enterprise Resource Planning systems to address linking Computer-Aided Design (CAD), Computer-Aided Manufacturing and the business process. Until recently, there is very little evidence of integration as a technique being applied in cost estimation. In industry, cost estimation is an important procedure to be used to measure the feasibility of a product as well as to predict the success or failure of a product.