Web-services environment for collaborative management of product life-cycle costs

There is an increasing need for effective tools for managing life cycle costs (LCC) of civil products. This paper presents a web-based semantic system for managing products' life cycle costs. The basic architecture of the proposed system represents costs as a hierarchy of cost elements. Each cost element has a dollar value that could be deterministic, probabilistic, or fuzzy. Several factors (also represented in hierarchies) can have a set of impacts on the values of these costs. Through the analysis of different impact possibilities and probabilities, a decision maker can study various alternative scenarios and define the optimum set of costs and their values. A set of web services are used to capture cost elements, factors, and their impacts. The semantic nature of the system allows for it to be an integral part of a corporate memory system, where decision makers will be able to document and access lessons learned about LCC optimization. Finally, the proposed system includes a framework for a LCC-centered supply chain, where all stakeholders can collaborate in optimizing product LCC.