Fractal-COSYSMO Systems Engineering Cost Estimation for Complex Projects

Cost estimation for engineering projects has advanced beyond the bottom-up counting of costs and the top-down use of analogies. Parametric cost estimation is now employed to estimate volatile software costs, as well as the cost of Systems Engineering (SE) effort in engineering projects. The Constructive Systems Engineering Cost Model (COSYSMO) estimates the number of Person-Months (PM) necessary to complete systems engineering projects by using project size and cost parameters. On re-examining the nature of systems engineering and the structures of complex projects that must be built in an orderly fashion on a variety of scales, it is apparent that a parametric formula that employs fractal dimensionality principles should be well suited for their cost estimation. This thesis therefore develops the connections between fractal dimensionality and cost estimation with COSYSMO. The result is Fractal-COSYSMO, a novel cost estimating formulation that can be used to determine the cost of developing systems that show complexity on a broad scale.