Design for economic feasibility of an automation system: Case of a shipbuilding company

In the increasingly competitive world of the 1990s, automation technology becomes inevitable for a shipbuilding company in Taiwan to achieve competitive costs. Most of the automated manufacturing systems have to be designed, tested, implemented, and maintained before the system is replaced. Unfortunately, the traditional present-value analysis ignores the system life cycle in analyzing the performance of a proposed system. The idea from system engineering is therefore to count not only the acquisition costs but also the operating and maintenance costs, and so on. The main contribution of this paper is to demonstrate the framework of the design for economic feasibility in a ship-building company. A strategy and plan are proposed for the design and implementation of the company's automation system.