Improvement of system design process: Towards whole life cost reduction

This paper describes the early findings of a research project to investigate the development of design processes to achieve reduced Whole Life Cost (WLC) within the aerospace industry, with a main focus on civil large engines (CLE). An investigation has been performed into the means of influencing the design decision processes through the analysis and in-depth understanding of the key in-service cost drivers. A three-level approach has been proposed to improve and, in some cases, to ensure information flow to enable best possible decisions on the early system design stage. A mapping of the in-service cost drivers has been made to each level of approach to raise the awareness, to educate and finally, to directly influence system design engineers decisions.