A study of life cycle costing in the perspectives of research and commercial applications in the 21st century

This paper presents a review of research in the area of life cycle costing and offers a critique of current commercial cost estimation systems. The focus of the review is on relevant academic research on life cycle cost from 2000 onwards. In addition to this a comparison of the current cost estimation systems is presented. Using the review findings and industrial investigations as a base, a set of mathematical representations for design and manufacturing costs and the introduction of the critical factors is proposed. These are considered in terms of the operational, maintenance and disposal costs to create a method for ascertaining the life cycle cost estimate for complex products. This is presented using as an exemplar, research currently being undertaken in the area of low volume and long life electronic products in the UK defence sector. The benefit of the method proposed is that it aims to avoid the inflexibility of traditional approaches which usually require historical and legacy data to support the cost estimation processes.