Description
Life cycle engineering has emerged as an effective approach to improve the design of products and materials, to reduce maintenance, and to contain costs from the construction phase to the end of life. In other terms, construction decision-makers need to consider the sustainability of a material or building element at any stage of its life cycle, discussing the resulting economic and environmental repercussions right from the design phase. Therefore, it is increasingly necessary to use both technical and economic evaluation approaches that can select investment initiatives in order to contain the overall costs that the investor has to bear until the decommissioning of the works.
This paper will first provide an overview of existing research on the Life Cycle-based approach for the economic evaluation of structural materials and civil infrastructure systems. Then, a Life Cycle Cost (LCC)-based model is defined to evaluate and compare the structural and economic performance of civil engineering constructions. The logical-operational steps on which the model is based concern: structural analysis of buildings; estimation of life-cycle costs; assessment of Global Cost; comparison of the performance of design alternatives.
Applications to case studies allow the model to be validated.
