Design knowledge formalization to shorten the time to generate offers for Engineer To Order products

Cost Estimation for offer generation in ETO companies is a critical and time-consuming activity that involves technical expertise and a knowledge base. This paper provides an approach to acquire and formalize the design and manufac-turing knowledge of a company. The method has been described as a sequence of steps, which moves from the data acquisition of the past projects to the definition of a cost function based on dimensioning parameters. This approach has been ex-perimented on a family of cranes for plants in collaboration with an industrial partner.