A Methodical Approach for an Economic Assessment of Joining Technologies under Risk – Optimized Decision-making in Automobile Body Development

摘要

The development of innovative lightweight car body solutions leads to a growing diversity of joining technologies. Although the automotive sector is cost-driven, the decision-making of the optimum technology is based on the expertise of design engineers; a standardized procedure for selecting the most economical technology does not exist. The extant literature features models of the life-cycle-costing (LCC) approach for the economic assessment. However, uncertainties such as volatile energy prices or varying production volumes are not considered. The research introduces a method for a holistic economic assessment of technologies based on two models: while the cost model applies the LCC and net present value approach for a dynamic cost accounting, the uncertainty model quantifies the risk to determine the expected value and deviation of a technology. The approach allows an optimized selection-process of joining technologies to determine the most economical solution under uncertainties already in the early stage of product development.