Abstract
A cost estimation system is required to assist in designing a product family. The aim of this paper is to identify the requirements and the problems in estimating the life cycle cost of a product family. Then, this paper also presents the state-of-the-art and the research challenges in developing a life cycle cost estimation system for a product family design. As the conclusion, the life cycle cost estimation process for a product family still needs to face the challenges to determine the end of life strategy of each sub module of a product family, to integrate the end of life strategy to estimate the life cycle cost of a product family, to estimate the life cycle cost of each component level of a product family for design purposes and for different technologies and approaches, to reduce the required time and effort for updating process in estimating the life cycle cost for different structures of different product families, and to transform the available information into the required information in order to estimate the life cycle cost of a product family at the early stage of product development.
Highlights
Manufacturing companies are under pressure to provide a variety of products in a shorter leadtime and in a cost effective way, without sacrificing product quality and environmental considerations, to be competitive in the market
It is important to find a way to transform the available information into the required information in order to estimate the life cycle cost and evaluate the design of a product family at the early stage of product development
A cost estimation system is required to estimate the life cycle cost in order to evaluate the design of different product families at the early stage of product development
Summary
Manufacturing companies are under pressure to provide a variety of products in a shorter leadtime and in a cost effective way, without sacrificing product quality and environmental considerations, to be competitive in the market. Simpson (as cited in [1]) proposes that an effective means of fulfilling the requirements, to provide a variety of products in a cost effective way, is through a product family design. A product family is defined as “a group of related products that is derived from a product platform to satisfy a variety of market niches” [2]. Derived from various definitions of a product platform as cited by Simpson et al, the groups of products are related because they share common functions, features, components, technologies, processes, knowledge, people and/or relationships, which form a product platform [2]. A product family consists of more than one product variant that share common things. A product platform consists of several parts that form a common structure. A variant is a part or a collection of parts that differentiates one of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI
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