Determination and costing of sustainable construction projects : option based decision support

Abstract

The building stock in Europe accounts for over 40% of the final energy consumption in the European Union. Moreover, the construction sector is one of the largest producers of industrial waste contributing 40-50% of landfill in some EU countries. A common way of creating a forward planning for resource efficiency in construction project is to apply Life Cycle Cost (LCC - cost evaluation) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA - environmental evaluation) procedures in the decision process. There are, however, difficulties in current LCC and LCA tools and it is challenging to combine data from those two types of tools since there are poor linkages between them. The EU funded 7th framework project CILECCTA sets out to develop a LCCA (Life Cycle Cost and Analysis) that combines life cycle cost with environmental affect and supports the determination of the costing and sustainability of project alternatives.Current LCC software can assist the decision making process in simulating different alternatives for the design, construction, maintenance and demolition of assets - allowing the client, designer and builder to select the most favourable alternative. Through linking LCC and LCA methodologies, the CILECCTA project will go one stage further by enabling an assessment of the impact of the entire project on the environment and by estimating its sustainability. It will also include probabilistic analysis and the recently developed new generation methodology which applies real options principles analysis for construction industry decision making. This paper sets out the strategic that should lead toward establishing a framework for developing a modular LCCA engine integrating asset-related data from price banks and life cycle inventories. ; Godkänd; 2010; 20101214 (andwan)