With the possibility of imitation, we discuss the pricing strategy of an inventor and the piracy-deterrence policy of a government. When inventor and imitator have asymmetric manufacturing costs, piracy may not be deterred by the government. When the inventor¡¦s cost of production is low enough, the inventor always stays in the market and the piracy only occurs if the social welfare is enhanced by the competition. When the inventor¡¦s cost of production is high, a monopoly market emerges and the identity of the monopolist, which can be the inventor or the imitator, is determined by the government through the piracy-deterrence policy such that the social welfare is maximized.

This thesis is the result of many years of research in the field of manufacturing cost modelling. It particularly focuses on the Data Collection Process for the development of manufacturing cost models in the UK Aerospace Industry with no less important contributions from other areas such as construction, process and software development. The importance of adopting an effective model development process is discussed and a new CMD Methodology is proposed. In this respect, little research has considered the development of the cost model from the point of view of a standard and systematic Methodology, which is essential if an optimum process is to be achieved. A Model Scoping 3 Framework, a functional Data Source and Data Collection Library and a referential Data Type Library are the core elements of the proposed Cost Model Development Methodology. The research identified a number of individual data collection methods, along with a comprehensive list of data sources and data types, from which essential data for developing cost models could be collected. A Taxonomy based upon sets of generic characteristics for describing the individual data collection, data sources and data types was developed. The methods, tools and techniques were identified and categorised according to these generic characteristics. This provides information for selecting between alternative methods, tools and techniques. The need to perform frequent iterations of data collection, data identification, data analysis and decision making tasks until an acceptable cost model has been developed has become an inherent feature of the CMDP. It is expected that the proposed model scoping framework will assist cost engineering and estimating practitioners in: defining the features, activities of the process and the attributes of the product for which a cost model is required, and also in identifying the cost model characteristics before the tasks of data identification and collection start. It offers a structured way of looking at the relationship between data sources, cost model characteristics and data collection tools and procedures. The aim was to make the planning process for developing cost models more effective and efficient and consequently reduce the time to generate cost models.

The increased use of advanced composites in aerospace manufacturing has led to the development of new production processes and technology. The implementation of advanced composites manufacturing technology is poorly served by traditional cost accounting methods, which distort costs by using inappropriate volume-based allocations of overhead. Activity-based costing has emerged as a methodology which provides more accurate allocation of costs to products or activities by their usage of company resources. Better designs may also be produced if designers could evaluate the cost implications of their choices early in the design process. This research describes a methodology whereby companies can improve product cost estimation at the conceptual design phase, using intelligent searching and arrangement of existing accounting data to enable designers to access the activity cost information more readily. The concept has considerable scope for application in industry because it will allow companies to make better use of information that is already being recorded in their information systems, by providing it in a form which will enable designers to make better informed decisions during the design process. The design decision support framework is illustrated by applying it to a typical problem in aerospace composites manufacturing. Feasibility of the approach is demonstrated using a prototype software model of the Design Decision Support System, implemented using commercially available software. / Ph. D.

<p>For a company to be competitive today, one way is to create a natural feedback loop from the production department to the design department with information regarding the production systems ability to deliver a finished component. The purpose with this feedback loop is to create respect for tolerances and to more design for manufacturing and assembly. The studied company in this thesis work developed a quality program to reach a spiral of continuous improvements to reduce cost of poor quality (CoPQ) and to reach an improved quality level (PPM). The object of this work was to test and improve the quality program called The Zero Tolerance Program. Delimitations were made when the work was started and ongoing which led to that the impact on PPM could not be studied. The connection to CoPQ was difficult to obtain and could only be proved theoretically, not practically, due to the short timetable.</p><p>During the short amount of time the right root cause could not be found. The thesis work findings came to a number of identified Measurable Success Criteria and requirements which must be in place for the further progress of The Zero Tolerance Program.</p> / PREPARE

Development of new Advanced Manufacturing Technology (AMT) for the aerospace industry is critical to enhance the manufacture and assembly of aerospace products. These novel AMTs require high development cost, specialist resource capabilities, have long development periods, high technological risks and lengthy payback durations. This forms an industry reluctance to fund the initial AMT development stages, impacting on their success within an ever increasingly competitive environment. Selection of suitable AMTs for development is typically performed by managers who make little reference to estimating the non-recurring development effort in resources and hardware cost. In addition, the performance at the conceptual stage is predicted using expert opinion, consisting of subjective and inaccurate outputs. AMTs selected are then submerged into development research and heavily invested in, with incorrect selections having a detrimental impact on the business. A detailed study of the UK aerospace manufacturing industry corroborated these findings and revealed a requirement for a new process map to resolve the problem of managing AMT developments at the conceptual stages. This process map defined the final research protocol, forming the requirement for a Cost-Benefit Forecasting Framework. The framework improves the decision making process to select the most suitable AMTs for development, from concept to full scale demonstration. Cost is the first element and is capable of estimating the AMT development effort in person-hours and cost of hardware using two parametric cost models. Benefit is the second element and forecasts the AMT tangible and intangible performance. The framework plots these quantified cost-benefit parameters and is capable of presenting development value advice for a diverse range of AMTs with varied applications. A detailed case study is presented evaluating a total of 23 novel aerospace AMTs verifying the capability and high accuracy of the framework within a large aerospace manufacturing organisation. Further validation is provided by quantifying the responses from 10 AMT development experts, after utilising the methodology within an industrial setting. The results show that quantifying the cost-benefit parameters provides manufacturing research and technology with the ability to select AMTs that provide the best value to a business.

Reliable cost estimation is important for economic production, cost control and maintaining competitive advantage in manufacturing contract bidding. Therefore, estimating the manufacturing cost of a machined part is of critical importance in CNC manufacture. Computers aided systems the link to manufacturers CAD systems and databases have been used since the 1980’s to identify product cost and enable a company to evaluate resource utilisation. While the concept of an integrated costing system has made significant advances in integrating the design function with the cost estimation process, there are still major gaps in acquisition and application of detailed product data for generation of timely and reliable costing information feedback to engineers. Integrated costing systems are information intensive and require significant manufacturing data support. A major obstacle is the bespoke nature of the available cost relevant data and their storage in company specific database tailored to individual company practices. Thus there is need to consider standardisation of information from the design of component through to their process planning and manufacture. This will allow seamless exchange of detailed, cost relevant, information between other computers aided systems and costing systems to facilitate automatic and reliable cost information feedback. In this research a novel framework is specified and designed for enabling detailed product information that exists across CNC manufacturing, to be utilised for generation of reliable cost estimates. The standards based costing proposed in this thesis framework facilitates high-level integration of various CAx resources and increases the availability of product creation process (PCP) data that are applicable in costing process. A prototype implementation of the unified costing framework is utilised to demonstrate the capabilities of the framework. The demonstration is conducted using two industrially inspired prismatic test components where the components machining cycles were timed with a stop watch and the actual result compared with the prototype system estimated result to determine its reliability. The research shows that implementation of manufacturing standard that contain structured representation PCP information together with an effective data retrieval mechanism and computational algorithms can provide a standard compliant framework to realise an information rich (detailed) costing system. The potential of the proposed framework is not limited to enabling the use of detailed information that exist within manufacturing facility to generate cost information; it also provides a standard compliant approach for the development of future generations of costing systems.

This paper studies the current cotton market situation. The situation is a recent vast increase in cotton fibre price, mainly due to tight supply and demand circumstances. Focus is on two issues; how the fibre price affect companies cost wise and the likely future development of the cotton market. The cotton market has been studied by hard facts and contemporary views from industry people and companies. Factors influencing the cotton market such as economical growth, population and substitute textile fibres are taken into consideration. Besides how companies themselves claim to respond to the cotton price increase cost calculations approximated by thumb rules of the industry are performed. The result is a higher cost, derived from higher cotton price, at the finish garment stage. The magnitude depend on if one sees it relative to retail price or manufacturing cost along with how the participant in the value chain react. The future cotton market is evaluated by what might effect cotton supply and cotton demand and how the market mechanism is likely to answer. Short term the high prices seem to lower the demand and along with a larger harvest next season prices should be lowered. Long term the price is suggested to remain high because of a larger grow in demand then supply. / Program: Magisterutbildning i Applied Textile Management

This paper studies the current cotton market situation. The situation is a recent vast increase in cotton fibre price, mainly due to tight supply and demand circumstances. Focus is on two issues; how the fibre price affect companies cost wise and the likely future development of the cotton market. The cotton market has been studied by hard facts and contemporary views from industry people and companies. Factors influencing the cotton market such as economical growth, population and substitute textile fibres are taken into consideration. Besides how companies themselves claim to respond to the cotton price increase cost calculations approximated by thumb rules of the industry are performed. The result is a higher cost, derived from higher cotton price, at the finish garment stage. The magnitude depend on if one sees it relative to retail price or manufacturing cost along with how the participant in the value chain react. The future cotton market is evaluated by what might effect cotton supply and cotton demand and how the market mechanism is likely to answer. Short term the high prices seem to lower the demand and along with a larger harvest next season prices should be lowered. Long term the price is suggested to remain high because of a larger grow in demand then supply. / Program: Applied Textile Management

For a company to be competitive today, one way is to create a natural feedback loop from the production department to the design department with information regarding the production systems ability to deliver a finished component. The purpose with this feedback loop is to create respect for tolerances and to more design for manufacturing and assembly. The studied company in this thesis work developed a quality program to reach a spiral of continuous improvements to reduce cost of poor quality (CoPQ) and to reach an improved quality level (PPM). The object of this work was to test and improve the quality program called The Zero Tolerance Program. Delimitations were made when the work was started and ongoing which led to that the impact on PPM could not be studied. The connection to CoPQ was difficult to obtain and could only be proved theoretically, not practically, due to the short timetable. During the short amount of time the right root cause could not be found. The thesis work findings came to a number of identified Measurable Success Criteria and requirements which must be in place for the further progress of The Zero Tolerance Program. / PREPARE

In this thesis, we consider a rescheduling problem on non-identical parallel machines with controllable processing times. A period of unavailability occurs on one of the machines due to a machine failure, material shortage or broken tool. These disruptions may cause the original schedule to become inecient and sometimes infeasible. In order to generate a new and feasible schedule, we are dealing with two conflicting measures called the eciency and stability measures simultaneously. The eciency measure evaluates the satisfaction of a desired objective function value and the stability measure evaluates the amount of change between the schedule before and after the disruption. In this study, we measure stability by the number of disrupted jobs. In this thesis, the job is referred as a disrupted job if it completes processing after its planned completion time in the original schedule. The eciency is measured by the additional manufacturing cost of jobs. Decreasing number of disrupted jobs requires compressing the processing time of a job which cause an increase in its additional manufacturing cost. For that reason we cannot minimize these objectives at the same time. In order to handle this, we developed a mixed integer programming model for the considered problem by applying the epsilon-constraint approach. This approach makes focusing on the single objective possible to get efficient solutions. Therefore, we studied the problem of minimizing additional manufacturing cost subject to a limit on the number of disrupted jobs. We also considered a convex compression cost function for each job and solved a cost minimization problem by applying conic quadratic reformulation for the model. The convexity of cost functions is a major source of diculty in finding optimal integer solutions in this problem, but applying strengthened conic reformulation has eliminated this diculty. In addition, we prepare an improvement search algorithm in order to find good solution in reasonable CPU times. We use our heuristic procedure on optimality properties we showed for a single machine subproblem. We made computational experiments on small and medium scale test problems. Afterwards, we compare the performance of the improvement search algorithm and mathematical model for their solution quality and durations.