Applying an improved CBR model to predict the civil aircraft direct maintenance cost in the design stage

Accurate prediction of civil aircraft maintenance cost in the design phase of a civil aircraft manufacture project plays a key role in success of the airplane sale and market share. Accordingly, many researchers or organizations have proposed various methodologies for predicting the cost in the design phase with limited information. This study was aimed at improving the prediction performance of a cost prediction model based on the Case-based Reasoning (CBR) technique, which has recently become widely used. Toward this end, an improved CBR model that uses the K-means technique in the retrieving phase of the CBR technique was developed. The proposed K-means-based revised CBR model is expected to be useful in estimating the civil aircraft maintenance cost in the initial phase of a project.