Practical Application of Life-Cycle Cost Effective Design and Rehabilitation of Civil Infrastructures

Abstract

Recently, the demand on the practical applicatioin of life-cycle cost effectiveness for design and rehabilitation of civil infrastructure is rapidly growing unprecedently in civil engineering practice. Accordingly, in the 21st century, it is almost obvious that life-cycle cost together with value engineering will become a new paradigm for all engineering decision problems in practice. However, in spite of impressive progress in the researches on the LCC, the most researches have only focused on the theoretical point but did not fully incorporate the critical issues for the practical implementation. Thus, this paper is intended to suggest a systemic integrated approach to the practical application of various LCC methodologies for the design and rehabilitation of civil infrastructures. For that purpose, hierarchical definitions of LCC models are presented to categorize the level of LCC assessment applicable for the practical implementation. And then, an integrated LCC system is introduced with an emphasis on data uncertainty assessment and user-friendly knowledge-based database for its successful implementation.