Sustaining product competitiveness with CSP on product configuration and lifecycle cost

To support sustainable development in manufacturing, product lifecycle management (PLM) has become an important concept in product family design for mass customization. Product lifecycle cost (PLCC) is an important component of effective PLM. Although there has been much work in cost estimation, the integration of lifecycle cost estimation in the product development process has not been satisfactorily addressed. In this paper, we aim to integrate product lifecycle cost estimation with product configuration. The objective is to apply a promising approach to the integration of product configuration and cost estimation. Our proposed model provides a means for designers to concurrently derive results from product configuration and cost estimation and utilize cost estimation as an effective measure for product configuration.