Cost estimation of new products has always been difficult as only few design, manufacturing and operational features will be known. In these situations, parametric or non-parametric methods are commonly used to estimate the cost of a product given the corresponding cost drivers. The parametric models use priori determined cost function where the parameters of the function are evaluated from historical data. Non-parametric methods, on the other hand, attempt to fit curves to the historic data without predetermined function. In both methods, it is assumed that the historic data used in the analysis is a true representation of the relation between the cost drivers and the corresponding costs. However, because of efficiency variations of the manufacturers and suppliers, changes in supplier selections, market fluctuations, and several other reasons, certain costs in the historic data may be too high whereas other costs may represent better deals for their corresponding cost drivers. Thus, it may be important to rank the historic data and identify benchmarks and estimate the target costs of the product based on these benchmarks. In this paper, a novel adaptation of cost drivers and cost data is introduced in order to use data envelopment analysis for the purpose of ranking cost data and identify benchmarks, and then estimate the target costs of a new product based on these benchmarks. An illustrative case study has been presented for the cost estimation of landing gears of an aircraft manufactured by an aerospace company located in Montreal, CANADA.

Lot streaming is a technique of splitting production lots into smaller sublots in a multi-stage
manufacturing systems so that operations of a given lot can be overlapped. This technique can
reduce manufacturing makespan and is an effective tool for time-based manufacturing strategy.
Several research articles appeared in literature to solve this problem and most of these studies
are limited to pure flowshop environments where there is only a single machine in each stage.
On the other hand, because of the applicability of hybrid flowshops in different manufacturing
settings, the scheduling of these types of shops is also extensively studied by several authors.
However, the issue of lot streaming in hybrid flowshop environment is not well studied. In this
paper, we aim to initiate research in bridging the gap between the research efforts in flowshop
lot streaming and hybrid flowshop scheduling. We present a comprehensive mathematical
model for scheduling flexible hybrid flowshop with lot streaming. Numerical example
demonstrated that lot streaming can result in larger makespan reduction in hybrid flowshop
where there is a limited research than in pure flowshop where research is abundant.

A multiproduct pipeline provides an economic way to transport large volumes of refined petroleum products over long distances. In such a pipeline, different products are pumped back−to−back without any separation device between them. The sequence and lengths of such pumping runs must be carefully selected in order to meet market demands while minimizing pipeline operational costs and satisfying several constraints. The production planning and scheduling of the products at the refinery must also be synchronized with the transportation in order to avoid the usage of the system at some peak−hour time intervals. In this paper, we propose a multi−period mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model for an optimal planning and scheduling of the production and transportation of multiple petroleum products from a refinery plant connected to several depots through a single pipeline system. The objective of this work is to generalize the mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation proposed by Cafaro and Cerdá (2004, Computers and Chemical Engineering) where only a single planning period was considered and the production planning and scheduling was not part of the decision process. Numerical examples show how the use of a single period model for a given time period may lead to infeasible solutions when it is used for the upcoming periods. These examples also show how integrating production planning with the transportation and the use of a multi−period model may result in a cost saving compared to using a single−period model for each period, independently.

Bombardier Aerospace’s high performance aircrafts and services set the utmost standard for the Aerospace industry. A case study in collaboration with Bombardier Aerospace is conducted in order to estimate the target cost of a landing gear. More precisely, the study uses both parametric model and neural network models to estimate the cost of main landing gears, a major aircraft commodity. A comparative analysis between the parametric based model and those upon neural networks model will be considered in order to determine the most accurate method to predict the cost of a main landing gear. Several trials are presented for the design and use of the neural network model. The analysis for the case under study shows the flexibility in the design of the neural network model. Furthermore, the performance of the neural network model is deemed superior to the parametric models for this case study.