ABSTRACT
Today, in the global economy and due to various other market pressures, the acquisition decisions of many engineering systems, particularly the expensive ones, are not made based on initial procurement costs but rather on their life cycle costs. Past experiences indicate that often engineering system ownership costs exceed acquisition costs. In fact, according to various studies [1], the engineering system ownership cost (i.e., logistic and operating cost) can vary from 10 to 100 times the original acquisition cost.
