life-cycle costs

The impact of uncertainty and the complexity of renewable heat and hot water production generate the demand for intelligent cost performance analyses to support or provide resilient data and therefore reliable managerial decisions. Especially the risk control and the planning of invest and operating costs of energetic systems are with the help of exact mathematical models only insufficient feasible. One approach provides the monte-carlo-simulation projection with the possibility to handle deterministic and stochastic model approaches. A new approach for the model based investigations of strategic investment decisions for solar heat, geothermal heat or biomass heating systems under consideration of complex uncertainty is the objective of this contribution.

Knowledge-Based Engineering (KBE) is the overall integration of knowledge, rules and process operation in the engineering process. It helps implanting the interdisciplinary know-how in product- and process development. The resulting effects are mainly time- and cost-cutting, which can be assigned as relevant competitive advantages against competitors. The importance of this field of study for industries like the automotive, ship-building, process engineering, plant manufacturing and machine-building industry was the significant reason for starting this research. At the very beginning, the focus was on the identification of certain descriptors through analyzing almost 100 scientific articles, books and dissertations about KBE. On the one hand this approach gives a deeper look into the state of the art and on the other hand it provides the possibility of ordering these articles in a certain hierarchy of relevance. The frequencies of indications of the given descriptors within the ...

Plant operators are getting more and more aware that operating costs are usually exceeding acquisition costs. For that reason there is an increased interest in methods like Life Cycle Costing (LCC) and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Weakness of these methods is their exclusive focus on costs. Because they do not allow differentiating benefits of various machines and plants, a holistic evaluation is difficult. The concept developed by the Institute of Production Engineering and Machine Tools (IFW) is concentrating on that issue, extending the Life Cycle Costing by a benefit assessment of investments.

Todays consumer markets demand more and more specialised products at low prices. The qualitative sale of their products, as well as development and maintenance, are expensive, complicated and error-prone. Consistent modularisation, combined with good component system management, can solve this trap of complexity. This process has to be supported by powerful tools. Accordingly these tools only take effect if modularisation is reality.