Ships Lifecycle Affordability Model (SLAM)

Early design stage cost modeling tools in use by the Navy typically ignore lifecycle and sustainment costs, as the acquisition community functions separately from the operations community and with a completely separate budget. Recently, congressional committees and Navy senior management (civilian and uniformed) have recognized that there is a wide disparity between purchasing what you can afford, and then affording what you purchase. This gap between acquisition, production and operations needs to be addressed as early as possible through innovative and modern approaches to ship cost estimating, effectively eliminating the term ship design cost estimate and replacing with ship lifecycle affordability model. Knowledge Based Systems Inc. (KBSI) proposes to incorporate a systems dynamics approach to cost modeling, effectively combining discrete, linear, and hierarchical cost estimating methods with non-linear system dynamics modeling tools that account for variables that influence producibility and sustainability and change over time or refine themselves based on the current state of other influencing variables. This system dynamics approach to a Ships Lifecycle Affordability Model (SLAM), combined with production based, rather than systems based, early stage models will create visibility of cost drivers and potential cost drivers that currently remain hidden using existing cost estimating tools and methodologies.