Abstract

The aerospace industry is highly competitive and is constantly seeking to develop new innovative aircraft programs in order to remain competitive and to gain new market segments. Due to the present economic situation, the necessity of cost initiatives is essential to comprehend, especially at an early conceptual stage. Cost understanding has become a crucial role in the supply chain to accurately predict target costs for all major structures and commodities in order to launch a new aircraft program within mandate and assist in commercial negotiations. To continuously improve turnaround time, costing models can be developed to improve the design to cost effort at the early stages of a new program. In this thesis, parametric models for estimating the cost of a component will be developed and compared. The study uses a comparative analysis between linear and non linear parametric models in order to determine which estimation method enhances the credibility of the cost estimate. The reliability of the costing models is evaluated by two different methodologies to determine which parameter(s) become significant and will therefore be used to determine the cost. These methodologies are the analysis of variance and path analysis. It is concluded that the non linear regression analysis achieves a lower level of error when comparing it to the linear regression. Moreover, possible future studies to develop topics pertaining to target costing are presented in this thesis.