Overview of Remaining Useful Life prediction techniques in Through-life Engineering Services

Through-life Engineering Services (TES) are essential in the manufacture and servicing of complex engineering products. TES improves support services by providing prognosis of run-to-failure and time-to-failure on-demand data for better decision making. The concept of Remaining Useful Life (RUL) is utilised to predict life-span of components (of a service system) with the purpose of minimising catastrophic failure events in both manufacturing and service sectors. The purpose of this paper is to identify failure mechanisms and emphasise the failure events prediction approaches that can effectively reduce uncertainties. It will demonstrate the classification of techniques used in RUL prediction for optimisation of products’ future use based on current products in-service with regards to predictability, availability and reliability. It presents a mapping of degradation mechanisms against techniques for knowledge acquisition with the objective of presenting to designers and manufacturers ways to improve the life-span of components

Short interval control for the cost estimate baseline of novel high value manufacturing products – a complexity based approach

Novel high value manufacturing products by default lack the minimum a priori data needed for forecasting cost variance over of time using regression based techniques. Forecasts which attempt to achieve this therefore suffer from significant variance which in turn places significant strain on budgetary assumptions and financial planning. The authors argue that for novel high value manufacturing products short interval control through continuous revision is necessary until the context of the baseline estimate stabilises sufficiently for extending the time intervals for revision. Case study data from the United States Department of Defence Scheduled Annual Summary Reports (1986-2013) is used to exemplify the approach. In this respect it must be remembered that the context of a baseline cost estimate is subject to a large number of assumptions regarding future plausible scenarios, the probability of such scenarios, and various requirements related to such. These assumptions change over time and the degree of their change is indicated by the extent that cost variance follows a forecast propagation curve that has been defined in advance. The presented approach determines the stability of this context by calculating the effort required to identify a propagation pattern for cost variance using the principles of Kolmogorov complexity. Only when that effort remains stable over a sufficient period of time can the revision periods for the cost estimate baseline be changed from continuous to discrete time intervals. The practical implication of the presented approach for novel high value manufacturing products is that attention is shifted from the bottom up or parametric estimation activity to the continuous management of the context for that cost estimate itself. This in turn enables a faster and more sustainable stabilisation of the estimating context which then creates the conditions for reducing cost estimate uncertainty in an actionable and timely manner

Financial Reporting for Environmental and Social responsibility: A Normative Strategic Concept

Corporate responsibility demands that firms address environmental and social values in their firm’s policy and key performance indicators. These are integrated through strategic planning and require firms to merge the longer term environmental and social values with short term economic objectives and performance measures. Each firm’s strategy will differ. This paper provides a normative reporting concept to connect the financial implications associated with longer term planning for environmental and social values, with short term accounting reports. Reporting variants adapted from total cost assessment, life cycle costing, variable costing are integrated to offer upstream information based on a product segment view.Strategy, environmental reporting, life cycle costing, cost systems, multi-period accounting, multi-stage fixed costs.

Toward the Integration of Economics and Outdoor Recreation Management

The general theme of this bulletin is that improved management of public-sector recreational resources is a multidisciplinary task. To this end, we attempt to integrate elements of outdoor recreation management theory and economics. The bulletin is written for both resource managers and researchers. For the former, our intent is to emphasize the importance of being aware of economic implications-at least conceptually-of management actions that influence the character and availability of recreational opportunities. To researchers involved in developing recreation management theory, we draw attention to the parallel between recreation management theory and the traditional managerial economic model of the firm. To economists, particularly those involved in developing and applying nonmarket valuation techniques, we draw attention to the types of decisions faced by resource managers. We argue that the most important resource allocation issues are of the incremental variety, so nonmarket valuation should also yield incremental values. These values alone, however, are not sufficient economic input into rational public choice analysis. The missing link , or nexus, between outdoor recreation management theory and economic analysis is the integration of supply and demand, as called for by traditional managerial economics. Collaborative research to develop recreation supply response functions akin to agricultural production functions is an essential step that is missing from both literatures. Theoretical and applied work assume greater practical importance if they feed information into this broadened framework. It is our hope that this bulletin will bring the disciplines closer to that realization

Climate change and health: a tool to estimate health and adaptation costs

Details the correct use of a WHO designed economic analysis tool to support health adaptation planning in European member states.Summary:The WHO Regional Office for Europe prepared this economic analysis tool to support health adaptation planning in European Member States. It is based on a review of the science. It is expected to be applied in Member States mainly by line ministries responsible for climate change adaptation. It provides step-by-step guidance on estimating (a) the costs associated with damage to health due to climate change, (b) the costs for adaptation in various sectors to protect health from climate change and (c) the efficiency of adaptation measures, i.e. the cost of adaptation versus the expected returns, or averted health costs. The tool consists of a document describing the methods step-by-step and a manual with an Excel spreadsheet, which is a visual aid for calculating costs

Estimating Discrete Markov Models From Various Incomplete Data Schemes

The parameters of a discrete stationary Markov model are transition probabilities between states. Traditionally, data consist in sequences of observed states for a given number of individuals over the whole observation period. In such a case, the estimation of transition probabilities is straightforwardly made by counting one-step moves from a given state to another. In many real-life problems, however, the inference is much more difficult as state sequences are not fully observed, namely the state of each individual is known only for some given values of the time variable. A review of the problem is given, focusing on Monte Carlo Markov Chain (MCMC) algorithms to perform Bayesian inference and evaluate posterior distributions of the transition probabilities in this missing-data framework. Leaning on the dependence between the rows of the transition matrix, an adaptive MCMC mechanism accelerating the classical Metropolis-Hastings algorithm is then proposed and empirically studied.Comment: 26 pages - preprint accepted in 20th February 2012 for publication in Computational Statistics and Data Analysis (please cite the journal's paper

Target value design: using collaboration and a lean approach to reduce construction cost

Target Costing is an effective management technique that has been used in manufacturing for decades to achieve cost predictability during new products development. Adoption of this technique promises benefits for the construction industry as it struggles to raise the number of successful outcomes and certainty of project delivery in terms of cost, quality and time. Target Value Design is a management approach that takes the best features of Target Costing and adapts them to the peculiarities of construction. In this paper the concept of Target Value Design is introduced based on the results of action research carried out on 12 construction projects in the USA. It has been shown that systemic application of Target Value Design leads to significant improvement of project performance – the final cost of projects was on average 15% less than market cost. The construction industry already has approaches that have similarities with elements of the Target Value Design process or uses the same terminology, e.g. Partnering and Target Cost Contracts, Cost planning, etc. Following an exploration of the similarities and differences Target Value Design is positioned as a form of Target Costing for construction that offers a more reliable route to successful projects outcomes