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

复杂的任务、基础设施和安全关键系统正在从传统的固定价格合同机制转变为购买支持。在能源、国防、交通和医疗保健等关键系统的政府和非政府采购中，新的基于绩效的合同越来越受欢迎。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。履约合同不是保证、租赁协议或维护合同，后者都是故障修复保证；更确切地说，这些合同是高度量化的“保证满意”的合同，其中“满意”是从产品收到的结果的组合，通常表述为时间（例如，操作可用性）、使用度量（例如，里程）或基于能量的可用性。基于绩效的合同（也称为基于结果的合同）可以采取不同的形式，其中合同规定的特定绩效区分了合同机制，例如基于绩效的物流（PBL），公私伙伴关系（PPPs）和电力购买协议（PPAs）。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，并作为工程设计过程的要求提供。该合同支持对基于性能合同的系统的合同和系统设计的集成进行基础研究。这种综合方法具有明显的社会效益，因为合同失败可能意味着公众花费数亿美元，要么没有结果，要么结果不充分，或者导致承包商被赶出业务，这可能导致包括公众在内的所有相关方的灾难。本研究将合同设计视为一个系统设计问题，其中设计涉及绩效指标、支付模式和绩效评估的合同条款的过程代表了一个可以集成到更广泛的工程设计过程中的多学科设计过程。将探索一种新方法的发展，该方法使用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廓线下具有多个设计参数的风电场的PPA合同。

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.