An Information Model of the Design Process for the Estimation of Product Development Effort

Abstract

Especially for small batch series or customer specific development orders, development costs are a noteworthy part of the overall costs and cannot be balanced by optimized production processes and lower production costs as in the case of mass production. Even though they might not be state of the art in industrial application, there are numerous methods for the estimation of costs that are determined in the course of product development. However, the costs caused by the actual development processes are hardly considered. This gap is supposed to be filled by an estimation of development costs as a direct consequence of development (and with it information handling) effort. For this an information model of the design process and the information handling steps which aregenerating the design effort are presented.