Performance-Contract Engineering: Exploration of the Concurrent Design of Contract Terms and Systems

履约合同工程：合同条款与制度并行设计探索

• 批准号: 1538674
• 负责人: Peter Sandborn
• 金额: $ 15万
• 依托单位: University of Maryland, College Park
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-08-15 至 2018-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1538674&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Performance; Contract; Engineering; Exploration; Concurrent

Complex mission, infrastructure and safety-critical systems are shifting away from traditional contract mechanisms of fixed-price followed by the purchase of support. Newer performance-based contracts are growing in popularity for governmental and non-governmental acquisitions of critical systems, such as for energy, defense, transportation and healthcare. These contracts allow the customer to buy the system performance rather than to purchase the product itself, or to buy availability rather than to pay for maintenance. Performance contracts are not warranties, lease agreements, or maintenance contracts, which are all break-fix guarantees; rather, these contracts are highly quantified "satisfaction guaranteed" contracts where "satisfaction" is a combination of outcomes received from the product, usually articulated as a time (e.g., operational availability), usage measure (e.g., miles), or energy-based availability. Performance-based contracts (also called outcome-based contracts) can take different forms where the particular performance that the contract specifies distinguishes the contract mechanism, e.g., performance-based logistics (PBL), public-private partnerships (PPPs), and power purchase agreements (PPAs). Unfortunately, the contract design itself is almost always performed separate from the engineering design process and provided as a requirement to the engineering design process. This award supports fundamental research towards the integration of the contract and system design for systems that are subject to performance-based contracts. Such an integrated approach has clear societal benefits since contract failure may mean hundreds of millions of dollars spent by the public for either no outcome or inadequate outcome, or result in the contractor being driven out of business, which can lead to disaster for all parties involved including the public. This research approaches contract design as a system design problem where the process of designing contractual terms that address performance metrics, the payment model, and performance assessment, represents a multidisciplinary design process that can be integrated into the broader engineering design process. The development of a new methodology will be explored that uses the customer and contractor goals as an input for determining the contractual and engineering design terms using principal-agent and contract theory to factor in incentives and information asymmetry. As a concrete case study, the research team will study PPA contracts for wind farms with multiple design parameters within a stochastic energy-price environment and uncertain wind profile.

复杂的特派团、基础设施和安全关键系统正在改变传统的合同机制，即先固定价格，然后购买支持。较新的基于绩效的合同越来越受欢迎，用于政府和非政府部门收购关键系统，如能源、国防、交通和医疗保健。这些合同允许客户购买系统性能，而不是购买产品本身，或者购买可用性，而不是支付维护费用。性能合同不是保证、租赁协议或维护合同，它们都是中断修复保证；相反，这些合同是高度量化的“满意度保证”合同，其中“满意度”是从产品收到的结果的组合，通常以时间(例如，操作可用性)、使用度量(例如，里程数)或基于能源的可用性来表述。基于业绩的合同(也称为基于成果的合同)可以采取不同的形式，其中合同规定的具体业绩与合同机制不同，例如基于业绩的后勤、公私伙伴关系和购电协议。不幸的是，合同设计本身几乎总是与工程设计过程分开进行，并作为要求提供给工程设计过程。该奖项支持将合同与系统设计相结合的基础研究，这些系统受基于绩效的合同约束。这种综合办法有明显的社会效益，因为合同失效可能意味着公众为没有结果或结果不充分而花费数亿美元，或者导致承包商被赶出企业，这可能会给包括公众在内的所有有关各方带来灾难。这项研究将合同设计作为一个系统设计问题，其中设计合同条款的过程涉及绩效指标、支付模式和绩效评估，代表了一个可以整合到更广泛的工程设计过程中的多学科设计过程。将探索开发一种新的方法，将客户和承包商的目标作为确定合同和工程设计条款的输入，使用委托-代理和合同理论来考虑激励和信息不对称。作为一个具体的案例研究，研究小组将研究在随机能源价格环境和不确定风速条件下具有多个设计参数的风力发电场的PPA合同。