An Approach to Life Cycle Cost Estimation for New Developed Manufacturing Processes

In industrial production, different internal and external factors lead to the continuous development and implementation of new and innovative manufacturing processes and related equipment. With respect to production design, a main challenge is to calculate the resulting costs throughout the estimated lifetime before these processes and equipment are implemented. As a well known approach to calculate the costs of implementing manufacturing processes and related machines, Life Cycle Costing (LCC) is based on empirical values. These values, however, do not necessarily exist for new and not yet in the industry implemented manufacturing processes. This article describes a new approach to enable the calculation of life cycle costs for new and not yet implemented manufacturing processes, which anticipates these costs based on established life cycle costing schemes of comparable manufacturing processes.