A COS ESTIMATION METHOD BASED ON THE.docVIP

Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Systems Vol. 10, No. 1 (2011) 85–92 c World Scienti?c Publishing Company DOI: 10.1142/S0219686711002016  A COST ESTIMATION METHOD BASED ON THE SECONDARY DEVELOPMENT OF SOLIDWORKS XIN ZHANG? and JIANWU ZHANG? School of Mechanical Engineering Shanghai Jiaotong University Shanghai, 200240, P. R. China ?zhangxinmt@163.com ?jwuzhang@  Due to the highly competitive nature of businesses today, cost estimation forms an important strategic process in making decisions about design and development of new products. It is advantageous to be able to estimate the product costs early in the prod- uct development cycle. In this paper, products’ cost structure based on the feature is proposed by analyzing product cost, and the calculation methods of manufacturing cost is introduced. By means of parametric designing capability, functional frame of cost estimation system is built on the basis of the secondary development technique of Solid- Works. Taking certain type of hydraulic support as an example, the software prototype of cost estimation is developed. The result of cost estimation accords with actual product cost prove the feasibility of cost estimation method based on the secondary development of SolidWorks.  Keywords: Concurrent engineering; design for cost; cost estimation; secondary develop- ment of SolidWorks; hydraulic support.  1. Introduction  Concurrent engineering is a systematic approach of product designing and corre- lated process concurrently. The factors of cost, manufacture, assemblage of product should be considered in product early-designing stage. Research shows that design cost of product accounts for only 5% of the whole design cost, which decides ～60%– 70% of product cost.1 As one of supporting tools of concurrent engineering, design for cost (DFC) is that the cost of product is reduced as far as possible in the premise of satisfying the requirements of user facilities when designing