Life Cycle Costing for Structural Analysis and Design

As the construction sector is a major contributor to the environmental pressures and impacts that are accelerating the climate crisis, there is an increasing focus on sustainability, adoption of innovative technologies and materials. The European Commission (EC) already in 2019 with the Green Deal recommended also in the construction sector the use of life cycle approaches to promote materials and strategies aimed at the transition to the circular economy (CE). In this context, Life Cycle Costing (LCC) is one of the successful techniques to identify the total cost of construction goods. Life cycle engineering has emerged as an effective approach to improve product and material design, to reduce maintenance and to contain whole life costs. Therefore, it is increasingly necessary to use both technical and economic evaluation approaches when selecting investments in order to contain the overall costs for the decision-maker until the project is decommissioned. Although this technique has around 50 years of history, its application and diffusion in the construction sector is still relatively limited. This paper first provides an overview of existing research on the Life Cycle-based approach for the economic evaluation of new structural materials and civil infrastructure systems. Then, LCC-based methodology is defined to assess and compare the structural and economic performance of civil engineering constructions. The logical-operational steps on which the analysis approach is based concern: (i) structural analysis of buildings; (ii) estimation of life-cycle costs; (iii) evaluation of the 'Global Cost' economic indicator; (iv) comparison of the economic and structural performance of design alternatives. This approach allows the designer to choose the material with the lowest life-cycle cost for the same mechanical and technical characteristics. In general terms, the use of such a methodology enables effective investment choices and can be a valuable support in the field of civil engineering whenever it is necessary to identify the most cost-effective of several structural alternatives. Research prospects concern the validation of the model through its application to case studies. It is also envisaged extending the study to the assessment of the environmental and social impacts arising from design alternatives.