Estimating the cost of a new technology intensive automotive product: A case study approach.

Estimating cost of new technology intensive products is very ad hoc within the automotive industry. There is a need to develop a systematic approach to the cost estimating, which will make the estimates more realistic. This research proposes a methodology that uses parametric, analogy and detailed estimating techniques to enable a cost to be built for an automotive powertrain product with a high content of new technology. The research defines a process for segregating new or emerging technologies from current technologies to enable the various costing techniques to be utilised. The cost drivers from an internal combustion engine's characteristics to facilitate a cost estimate for high- volume production are also presented. A process to enable a costing expert to either build an estimate for the new technology under analysis or use a comparator and then develop a variant for the new system is also discussed. Due to the open nature of the statement ‘new technology’, research is also conducted to provide a meaningful definition applicable to the automotive industry and this pro

Combinatorics of the Sonnet

Using a definition of a sonnet, the number of basic rhyming schemes is enumerated. This is then used to discuss the 86 sonnets which appear in John Clare\u27s The Rural Muse

Completing the design spectra for graphs with six vertices and eight edges

Apart from two possible exceptions, the design spectrum has been determined for every graph with six vertices and at most eight edges. The purpose of this note is to establish the existence of the two missing designs, both of order 32

Theta Graph Designs

We solve the design spectrum problem for all theta graphs with 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15 edges

Designs for graphs with six vertices and ten edges - II

The design spectrum has been determined for ten of the 15 graphs with six vertices and ten edges. In this paper, we solve the design spectrum problem for the remaining five graphs with three possible exceptions

Properties of Steiner triple systems of order 21

Properties of the 62,336,617 Steiner triple systems of order 21 with a non-trivial automorphism group are examined. In particular, there are 28 which have no parallel class, six that are 4-chromatic, five that are 3-balanced, 20 that avoid the mitre, 21 that avoid the crown, one that avoids the hexagon and two that avoid the prism. All systems contain the grid. None have a block intersection graph that is 3-existentially closed.Comment: 12 page

On the upper embedding of symmetric configurations with block size 3

We consider the problem of embedding a symmetric configuration with block size 3 in an orientable surface in such a way that the blocks of the configuration form triangular faces and there is only one extra large face. We develop a sufficient condition for such an embedding to exist given any orientation of the configuration, and show that this condition is satisfied for all configurations on up to 19 points. We also show that there exists a configuration on 21 points which is not embeddable in any orientation. As a by-product, we give a revised table of numbers of configurations, correcting the published figure for 19 points. We give a number of open questions about embeddability of configurations on larger numbers of points

Mutually avoiding Eulerian circuits

Two Eulerian circuits, both starting and ending at the same vertex, are avoiding if at every other point of the circuits they are at least distance 2 apart. An Eulerian graph which admits two such avoiding circuits starting from any vertex is said to be doubly Eulerian. The motivation for this definition is that the extremal Eulerian graphs, i.e. the complete graphs on an odd number of vertices and the cycles, are not doubly Eulerian. We prove results about doubly Eulerian graphs and identify those that are the `densest' and `sparsest' in terms of the number of edges.Comment: 22 pages; 9 figure