Bogie Life Cycle Cost Estimate Analytical Modeling And Software Development

The life cycle cost (LCC) is an important indicators to measure product economic factor. The product purchase cost and the maintenance expense are two main parts of the product LCC. With further understanding on LCC, many countries have carried out a series of studies on the LCC of some important industry equipments.Bogie is the most important and expensive independent part of railway vehicles, and bears the whole weight of car body, and guides the vehicle running smoothly along the rail. Because bogie manufacturing and maintenance process is complex, to estimate its LCC is a difficult work. The LCC of bogie is taken as a research subject and the paper aims at building the bogie LCC estimation models and software system.On the basis of summing up the LCC estimation theories and methods both at home and abroad, the bogie LCC components, influencing factors, and modeling methods are elaborated in detail. Through spot investigation, the decomposing frameworks of manufacturing and maintenance cost are established, which provided the foundation for collecting bogie cost data and establishing its LCC estimation model.Bogie production cost model and maintenance cost model are studied by using artificial neural network (ANN) and gray prediction method. The rapid estimation of the production cost model based on the improved ANN and the defined equipment estimation model based on the tree strctures of the bogie are built in the production cost model. The rapid estimation of the maintenance cost based on the gray prediction method and the the detailed estimation of bogie maintenance cost based on engineering estimate and analogy methods are built in the maintenance cost model. The choice of variables and the processing of historical data in the models are studied and discussed in depth.IDEF method is adopted to design and analyze the function, structure and the database of the soft system in the research and development of bogie LCC software. The software of bogie LCC estimation is developed based on C # and SQL Server 2000 database, and combined with the powerful mathematical software Matlab and the secondary development technology of Pro/ENGINEER. This system's development raised the efficiency and the accuracy of the estimation of bogie LCC greatly. The paper has a certain significance of reference and guidance for LCC modeling and estimation of software development of other similar products.