NASA instrument cost/schedule model Hamid Habib-Agahi

NASA's Office of Independent Program and Cost Evaluation (IPCE) has established a number of initiatives to improve its cost and schedule-estimating capabilities. One of these initiatives has resulted in the JPL-developed NASA Instrument Cost Model (NICM). NICM is an instrument cost and schedule estimator that contains the following: A system-level cost-estimation tool, a subsystem-level cost-estimation tool, a database of cost and technical parameters of over 140 previously flown NASA remote-sensing and in-situ instruments, a schedule estimator, a set of rules to estimate cost and schedule by life cycle phases (B/C/D), and a novel tool for developing joint probability distributions for cost and schedule risk (Joint Confidence Level (JCL)). This paper describes the development and use of NICM, including the data-normalization processes, data-mining methods (cluster analysis, principal components analysis, regression analysis and bootstrap cross validation), the estimating equations themselves and a demonstration of the NICM tool suite.