Cost data modeling in relation to the TRACE project

Abstract:
In the automotive business, the use of components especially built for automotive is everyday life. Building these components induces cost and time expenditure. For this delay consumer components start to move into the automotive domain. The use of consumer components in automotive application creates possible risks in different dimensions, mostly reliability, obsolescence, and cost. Because the designs are done by engineers, the focus is set on functionality and reliability. The pur-chasing department looks at the cost of components, and the marketing tries to sell the latest features a customer can imagine. The engineers try to develop a reliable product, and everyone hopes that the marketing will be able to sell it. Obviously there are many forces pulling and pushing the design. This contribution describes the interdependencies in more details and present a modeling approach for the different forces with the intent of showing a path to an optimized design. For real life a model is not sufficient, and so we are also describing the implementation approach for the appropriate tool.