Cost Modeling Technologies

In several initiatives to help government and commercial enterprises stretch their budgets and control their costs, KBSI has developed a number of innovative methods and technologies for addressing cost management issues. KBSI’s technologies combine structured methodologies with the latest best costing practices.

When determining how to cost different strategy options, decision makers must consider not only the costs incurred today, but also the costs incurred down the road as a consequence of their strategy choice. In other words, effectively weighing different maintenance strategy options requires both cost accounting and cost projection methods and tools. Cost accounting methods assist in appropriately allocating observed costs based on actual resource consumption. Methods like Activity Based Costing (ABC) provide a useful framework for this purpose. Cost projection involves determining the upcoming costs and the timeframe in which they will be incurred.  KBSI has developed cost modeling technologies for a number of projects, providing government and commercial industries with solutions to their cost management issues.  

In addition to numerous research initiatives, KBSI has developed its own COTS tools to assist customers with their cost management needs.  The AIØ WIN® software models business activities and, using automated Activity Based Costing (ABC) modeling and analysis capabilities, traces the costs of those activities. KBSI’s SMARTCOST® helps capture the significant cost elements in a domain and the attributes that drive their costs. Capture rules encode experts’ experience in how costs are realized. SMARTCOST® can also help users visually organize knowledge bases within a product or work breakdown structure and dynamically pivot to view knowledge in different ways, create reusable knowledge modules of select portions of the knowledge base. It can also help assemble composite knowledge bases from these reusable components and generate multi-level cost models supporting estimation summary.

 

 

Ship's Lifecycle Affordability Model (SLAM)

KBSI is taking a systems dynamics approach to cost modeling for early-stage lifecycle cost estimation in building a lifecycle affordability model for the U.S. Navy.  This innovative approach will effectively combine discrete, linear, and hierarchical cost-estimating methods with activity based costing and non-linear system dynamics modeling tools to create a system in which the cost models will change over time (i.e., refine themselves) based on the current state of other influencing variables, including the current level of development and the estimated time to contract.

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Army Transformation in Logistics & Sustainment (ATLAS™)

KBSI is developing a unified modeling and experimentation framework that uses simulation, tradeoff analysis, and data mining analysis and optimization to enhance the Army's current and future combat systems maintenance and maintenance manpower planning.

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Cost Benefit Analysis Support Environment (CBASE)

KBSI developed and demonstrated a new integration-driven paradigm for cost benefit analysis. The CBASE technology provides qualitative and quantitative methods for modeling problem situations, performing cost benefit analysis, validating cost analysis by simulation, generating alternative scenarios, and comparing cost benefits across scenario.

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Lean Value Chain (LVC)

KBSI developed technologies and process improvements supporting critical part anticipation, solution presentation and solution management oversight. The initiative also leveraged and implemented principles of advanced supply chain management at the Corpus Christi Army Depot (CCAD) and Tinker Air Force Base.

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Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul Physics and Principles of Operation (MP2O)

KBSI is researching and developing resource management policy simulation methods and tools to help depot managers improve agility, throughput, and system responsiveness amidst ever-changing demands, priorities, and resource constraints.  MP2O based model focus on the essential aspects of the MRO system, allowing management to broaden their understanding of the MRO system and generate salient, rigorously tested decisions that are both comprehensive and pointed in their execution. 

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On Demand Simulation Support (ODSS)

KBSI designed, built, and deployed a system that provides for the rapid creation and application of simulation modeling for depot management decision support. ODSS uses a hybrid discrete-event/rule based simulation engine for execution within an advanced experiment management environment, providing support for optimizing plans, schedules, situation response, and process designs.

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Reliability Centered Maintenance Scheduler (RCMS™)

KBSI developed a tool and supporting application methodology that encapsulates a reliability-centered maintenance strategy supporting maintenance planning and scheduling such that multiple competing objectives are simultaneously optimized. The RCMS™ methodology and tool consider the overall effects of possible maintenance actions, or the risk of not performing those maintenance actions, on aggregate level metrics like engine availability, performance, and life cycle cost.

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Reliability Centered Maintenance Costing (RCMC™)

KBSI developed the methods and tools needed to support the critical knowledge discovery, cost modeling, and maintenance cost projection needed by Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) decision makers. The RCMC™ methodology considers the effects of possible maintenance actions--including the risk of not performing those maintenance actions--on aggregate level metrics like engine availability, performance, and life cycle costs.

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Toolkit for Enabling Adaptive Modeling & Simulation (TEAMS™)

KBSI developed a decision support tool that uses simulation to help NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) model and simulate various activities associated with the spaceport project operations, improving decision making in areas like space vehicle mix impact, launch rates, asset utilization, and spaceport life cycle costs.

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Wireless-enabled Workflows for Ship Manufacturing and Repair (AWSM™)

KBSI is developing a new paradigm for ship manufacturing based on a redesign of manufacturing processes and the use of computing and wireless technologies that will deliver information--activity statuses, resource availabilities, design and scheduling changes--to every user, work crew, or process, regardless of location, involved in the ship production or repair.

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Hybrid Decision Wizard (HDWizard™)

KBSI developed, built, and validated a hybrid decision support toolkit that utilizes a combination of common sense reasoning, domain knowledge based reasoning, and soft computing techniques to support intelligent decision making. HDWizard™ is an agent-based decision support system that facilitates the automated generation of information from disparate and distributed data to support user-defined decision support goals.

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Pathfinder

KBSI designed and developed a comprehensive suite of technologies for life-cycle cost justification, cost/benefit analysis, integrated performance prediction, quantified trade-off analysis, and management decision-making for individual project selection, monitoring, and control. Pathfinder addressed the need for life cycle costing in depot environments, where the operational benefits of acquiring and maintaining weapons systems must be continually balanced. 

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