Lifecycle Switching Costs

Abstract Switching costs, an important topic in adaptive systems, are the costs incurred by modifying a product design to another. Most previous works focused on development switching costs. However, design switching can trigger different production costs and operational costs too. Also, for development costs, only two methods, process‐based and parametric are available. For open‐source tools, only one tool is available, COSYSMO (parametric). However, parametric methods require large sets of historic cost data, and cannot support small or medium size products, which leaves the problem still unresolved. This paper addressed these gaps. Its contributions are: first, it analyzed the whole lifecycle switching cost and revealed that some mathematical properties from development switching costs no longer hold. Second, it identified and proved the new mathematical properties for lifecycle switching costs, and developed a new useful concept, vendor switching cost. Third, it presented a new tool for estimating these costs, which does not rely on product sizes, making it the first open‐source tool that supports all systems. Finally, we demonstrated its effectiveness through an example use case of office area design, and made the tool available online, with a manual and this detailed example.