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The Hidden Feat Behind Development Cost Escalation - How Engineering Design Enables Functional Expansion in the Aerospace Industry

Part of: Product Architecture and Modularization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2019

Agathe Gilain ,
Pascal Le Masson  and
Benoît Weil

Abstract

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The aerospace industry experiences a considerable growth in product development costs. Many research works aim at identifying evolution laws characterizing this large-scale phenomenon and at developing design strategies which could help mitigate it. This paper aims to clarify the evolution dynamics governing this phenomenon by studying how the products delivered by these costly projects evolve with time. Increasing complexity is often held responsible for surging costs. If complexity is generally defined as the price to be paid for improving product functionalities, it is rarely specified whether the improvement affects existing functionalities or involves new ones. We aim to identify the patterns of cost growth which can be associated with phenomena of existing functionalities upgrade and new functionalities introduction, and to identify the associated design capabilities that designers need to deploy in order to keep product change and cost growth under control. To that end, we introduce a model which generates curves, each of which featuring a trend of cost growth, specific to a scenario of product evolution and being interpretable as a signature of a strategy used by designers.

Keywords

Design costingFunctional modellingProduct architectureInnovationFunctional expansion
Type
Article
Information
Proceedings of the Design Society: International Conference on Engineering Design , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , July 2019 , pp. 3011 - 3020
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2019

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