A financial outlay or expenditure to achieve some objective1, or the loss or penalty incurred by the failure to do so.
In the developmental context, different kinds of costs have differing implications:
- Developmental costs are those associated with reaching some initial production milestone, which may (or may not) include some portion of the Manufacturing costs;
- Manufacturing costs are associated with establishing factory capabilities and, typically, the non-recurring and recurring effort to produce an item
- Operating costs are associated with the End Use of an item, and may (or may not) include Maintenance costs
- Maintenance costs are associated with repair or replacement of all or part of an item once it has been fielded
- Life Cycle costs intended to wrap all of the afore-mentioned costs into a single “net equivalent value” relative to some chosen time
The different costs can (and should2) carry different weights during developmental trade studies.
Footnotes