Model-Based Switching Costs

Switching cost;MBSE;Model-Based Systems Engineering

In product development, rarely a product is developed from scratch. In most cases, a product is developed from a prior design or several prior designs. The associated development cost is actually a switching cost (or some called reuse cost), representing the additional cost on developing the product from prior designs. Prior works in this area were developed without considering the MBSE (Model-Based Systems Engineering). Today, MBSE is being widely adopted. It is important to develop switching cost development methods that leverage models and support model-based development needs. This paper, for the first time per the best of our knowledge, discusses switching cost development method for MBSE. Our work identifies different use case scenarios/phases in an MBSE development cycle, and provides corresponding switching cost estimation methods, to support various certification needs, laying down the fundamental methodology for the model-based switching cost estimations. Using SysML language, an example use case of derivative airplane electrical power system is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods.