The building stock in Europe accounts for over 40% of the final energy consumption in the European Union. Moreover, the construction sector it is one of the largest producers of industrial waste contributing40-50% 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 there are poor linkages between them. The EU funded 7th framework project CILECCTA sets out to develop a LCCA (Life Cycle Cost and Analysis) tool supporting 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 whole project on the environment and estimating its sustainability.  It will also include probabilistic analysis and the recently developed new generation methodology which applies the principles to real options analysis to construction industry decision making.

This paper sets out the strategy that should lead toward establishing a framework for developing a modular LCCA engine integrating asset-related data from price banks and life cycle inventories. 

Abstract (shortened):

The building stock in Europe accounts for over 40% of the final energy consumption in the European Union. 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 there are poor linkages between them. The EU funded 7th framework project CILECCTA sets out to develop a LCCA (Life Cycle Cost and Analysis) tool supporting the determination of the costing and sustainability of project alternatives.

Through linking LCC and LCA methodologies, the CILECCTA project will go one stage further than current software by enabling an assessment of the impact of the whole project on the environment and estimating its sustainability.  It will also include probabilistic analysis and the recently developed new generation methodology which applies the principles to real options analysis to construction industry decision making.

This paper sets out the strategy that should lead toward establishing a framework for developing a modular LCCA engine integrating asset-related data from price banks and life cycle inventories.