Designing for life cycle cost

Life cycle cost (LCC) is referred to as the total cost of acquiring the product, establishing the necessary logistics base from which to deploy and use the product, and maintaining the product in operable condition over some prescribed period of time. A system of negative and positive incentives is shown to provide the motivation for the contractor to realize or improve upon the predicted costs. The discussion is limited to the case of a UHF radio as a relatively simple subsystem equipment used in many different applications within systems. To win an LCC competition, the designer must attempt to assess the sensitivities of the overall LCC model and particularly examine any peculiarities of the sample use plan that will be implemented to measure the apparent LCC. In so doing, the designer is governed by three primary variables: the equipment specification, the maintenance-use concept, and the LCC verification sampling plan. Life versus MTBF (mean time between failures) versus cost-to-repair is discussed, along with designing the remote version of UHF radio and its maintenance philosophy. Future trends in LCC challenges to save ownership cost as opposed to discarding failed products are examined.