SHIP DESIGN LIFE CYCLE COSTING ASSISTANT

This project establishes the baseline for developing a usable ship design Life Cycle Cost (LCC) estimating assistant that adequately accounts for Producibility and Operation and Support (O&S) costs. Existing Cost Estimating (CE) methodologies are unsatisfactory, primarily due to their dependency upon data that is impossible or impractical to get, especially during the acquisition phase and particularly pertinent to O&S costs. This effort provides a review of the many CE methodologies, initiatives to improve shortcomings, and research into their efficacy. A prime result will be the identification of the critical causal relationships of LCC drivers, minimal essential data, and potential sources of that data. Concentrating on those critical elements, favorable CE methodologies will be augmented with a CE expert system to provide a CE assistant usable for ship design trade-offs in early program phases. Augmentation includes the structure of a corporate data base of program LCC experience across programs, use of operational simulators to expand the experience base with synthetic data from "what-if" scenarios, and navigation and parameter generation help to interface to specialty engineering models throughout DoD and industrial organizations. Approaches to acquire and preprocess actual O&S data will also be identified.