A Cross-Discipline, Project-Based Approach to Teaching Engineering Economy

In this paper, we describe a project-based approach to teaching Engineering Economy. The semester-long project has been designed to foster cross-disciplinary interactions between Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) students and Civil Engineering and Engineering Technology (CE) students during the Fall 2013 semester. To facilitate the cross-discipline project, a phantom company, Orange Inc., has been fabricated as the employer of the ECE students. Orange Inc. has been described to the students as a consumer electronics company with product lines that compete with those of Apple and Samsung. Additionally, Orange Inc. has an online marketplace where applications and other digital media may be purchased. Due to rapid growth in demand, the availability of the online marketplace has become a concern. Therefore, Orange Inc. has issued a request for proposal (RFP) for the development of a new data center. The CE students were tasked with forming groups (as fictitious companies) to respond to the RFP with the ECE students acting as internal liaisons to aid the CE students in their proposal development. The ECE students were required to generate estimates of quarterly operating and maintenance expenses for the data center and were given a trajectory of expected benefits from the data center over its 10-year expected lifecycle. After the CE groups submitted the proposals, the ECE students were then tasked with generating quarterly pro forma cash flow statements for each proposal. The proposal cash flows were compared using incremental rate of return analysis to determine which proposal was the best from an engineering economic perspective. Finally, each ECE student was required to write a performance report detailing the successes and failures of each individual, the ECE group, and the CE group with whom they worked. A similar reflection piece was required of the CE students.