Cost Modelling for Aircraft in a Multi-Disciplinary Design Context

摘要

The majority of existing cost models look at a specific manufacturing process or a particular aspect of maintenance, and hence do not provide a complete picture. The challenge in manufacturing new aircraft is to look into all the aspects of cost and link these into the decision-making process at early design stage. There is a strong need to understand the cost associate with different competing concepts, and this could be addressed by incorporating cost estimation in the design process. This work discusses the generation of a Multidisciplinary Cost Suite for preliminary aircraft design. The key feature of the cost suite is that it captures the attributes of a design that drive the cost, which generally is not only weight, but also assembly and detailed manufacturing costs, which are directly taken into account by means of component layout and manufacturing rules. The model is built with the integration of an Excel and Visual Basic interface, and integrated within a Model Centre environment framework that can automatically take inputs from external sources.