ABSTRACT
Economics plays an important role in any engineering field, primarily as an aid in making design decisions. There is always a need to find the least expensive way to solve a problem and, at the most basic level, economics provides a system for this accounting. The typical approach is to generate alternative solutions or designs and to evaluate these alternatives with economic criteria. The application of economics to engineering is a traditional subdiscipline called engineering economics (Grant and Ireson, 1964; Sepulveda et al., 1984).
