Design Related Cost Accounting with a Modular System of Cooperating Backpropagation Networks

Abstract

The design engineer determines a great part of the later product costs during its design and development. It is the goal of the design related cost accounting to reveal the impact of the decisions of the design engineer on the costs. Basis of design stage cost evaluations is the available information about the planned product. This information about new products not only related to single objects like the products, the assemblies or the parts, but also structural information as held in the bills of materials, which define hierarchical relations between the objects. A modular connectionist system uses both kinds of for design related cost accounting. Object specific neural networks evaluate costs on basis of this object related information. The structural information in form of the bills of materials is pictured to the structure of the modular connectionist system. This modular system consists of several cooperating neural networks, each dedicated to one of the objects. The costs of the assembly processes, where several parts or assemblies are transformed into a more complex object, are determined by specific neural networks also. These single estimations are summed up to a cost evaluation of the total product.