The work that will be presented in

The work that will be presented in this paper concerns this former study and uses a concept called cost entity [5]. It includes several concepts: the cost inductors from the activity based accounting methods, the feature from the CAD and the homogeneity from the analytical cost accounting. Consequently, in order to define a cost entity, it is necessary to fill in several attributes linking technical and economical variables. The product model uses the concept of manufacturing feature. The cost are evaluated on the base of specific knowledge and reasoning models with the tool “Cost Advantage”, giving information on costs to the CAD model. This is adding a cost semantic level to the CAD model. This models (called costgramme) put the expertise of the manufacturing cost available to the designer.

Some models, dedicated to the sand casting production of primary parts, were created with the wish to evaluate a meta-model that could be deployed in all the sand casting industries. Thus, the goals of this study are, on the one hand, to create the more generic as possible model related to the sand casting job, and on the other hand, to determine how they are transposable from a company to another (or from a production line to another…). So we will have to define and discuss which are the limits of the concepts from the triptych product/process/cost, and what level of detail is necessary to implement the methodology in most of the industrial environment.

This study is realized in collaboration with Cognition Europe, software developer of the tool Cost Advantage, and based on an industrial experimentation in the already-mentioned SMC Colombier Fontaine casting enterprise.