Challenges and new trends in infrastructure life cycle cost analysis

Abstract

Copyright The Author(s) 2022. Life Cycle Cost Analysis (LCCA) is a decision support tool that is used by politicians, investors, managers, and engineers to select the best alternative for investments or infrastructure projects. This paper will focus on the applications of LCCA for infrastructural engineering and will present challenges and new trends in LCCA. Several examples of LCCA analyses for transportation infrastructure projects and more specific for the selection of best paving materials (asphalt concrete or Portland cement concrete) and pavement treatment alternatives will be explained. Reliability and accuracy of any LCCA depends on many factors in this process. Some important factors that impact the output of this process could be: estimated costs, activity times, analysis periods, and how to consider future uncertainties such as inflation. The impact of these factors and their attributes on LCCA results will be discussed. A new trend in LCCA is to consider the impact of environmental, social, and users’ costs; however, the complexity of these inputs and how to determine their associated costs are immense challenges. It is critical that infrastructure engineers be aware of capabilities and limitations of any LCCA. Any decision-making tool like LCCA has its limitations; therefore, infrastructure engineers must also consider other complementary decision support systems such as project management tools such as risk analysis to select the best alternative for their projects.