Knowledge-based cost engineering for industrial robot systems

Robot systems are special machinery and require diverse engineering and integration tasks during commissioning. Established costing approaches do not offer the possibility to model the activities and resulting cost during integration and to effectively re-use knowledge of past projects among different stake holders. This paper proposes a new costing approach integrating elements from life-cycle costing (LCC) and activity-based costing (ABC) with the Product, Process, Resource (PPR) approach commonly used in PLM system. Interval analysis is used in order to describe uncertainties and track their effect through the entire cost-model.