Estimating the costs of products during development to design a cost efficent product is a well established process. But in the case of Product-Service Systems estimating the costs of the individual product is not sufficent. Instead it is necessary to calculate the cost incured over the entire life cycle of the product. Because with Product-Service Systems the majority of costs is not incurred during manufacturing of the product but instead during the operation. One of the major cost components accruing during the operation of the product are the maintennace costs. Therefore, current life cycle costing models show the impoact of component design on the maintennace cost of the Product-Service System. But they do not show how different maintennace strategies that can have an impact on the overall life cycle costs of the Product-Service System. Thus, this paper shows a method for the implementation of different maintennace strategies into life cycle costing and applies it in an industrial use case.

With the spread of product-service systems as business models the life cycle costs are of increasing importance as a measurement of product cost. A key factor that drives these costs is the desired reliability of the products used to provide the service. Since the customer usually expects as uninterrupted service availability, it is imperative to achieve the the required reliability. Therefore a large variety of methods has been developed to maximize the reliability of a product. But these approaches focus on the maximization of the reliability and disregard the resulting product costs. This can lead to designs that over perform concerning their reliability requirements but also exceed their target costs. Which will result in the product-service system not being competitive in the marketplace or lowering the company's profit. This paper shows an approach on how to use markov chains to enable a quick comparison of life cycle costs from different product-service system designs With this it will be possible to make better informed decisions about the costs of a system while still meeting the reliability targets.

Low-cost enabling technologies for T/R modules (TRMs) in phased array radars are proposed and analyzed in terms of technology, performance, and cost aspects. Phase and amplitude controlling integrated circuits (ICs) realized in a low-cost standard silicon process are demonstrated. The design of several ICs at the S-, C-, on X-band has shown that silicon germanium is a strong contender for gallium arsenide. This also applies to TRMs suited for military active phased array antenna (AESA) radars. The circuits presented in this paper are manufactured by austriamicrosystems in their 0.35 µm SiGe-BiCMOS process with an fT of around 70 GHz. A TRM packaging concept based on soldered surface-mount technology and organic substrates is also demonstrated. A cost analysis concludes that by using the proposed packaging concept and the SiGe core-chip technology, the TRM production cost can be potentially reduced by 70% compared to traditional ceramic hermetic packaging with core chip in GaAs technology.