Thesis (S.B.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2004.Includes bibliographical references (leaf 27).There has been an increasing demand for cost estimation tools which aid in the reduction of system cost or the active consideration of cost as a design constraint. The existing tools are currently incapable of anticipating the unseen or latent effects of design changes made in an effort to cut cost. This paper presents an example of how the tools and concepts of axiomatic design theory can be integrated with the parametric cost estimation process, and then presents a series of arguments for why tools such as these which examine the functional architecture of a system are useful for optimizing cost at the preliminary design level.by Lael Ulam Odhner.S.B
