Significance of Life Cycle Costing for Selection of Building Construction Materials

The construction industry is one of the ever growing and leading sectors, which contributes to the economic growth of any nation. One of the current challenges in this industry is to ensure compliance with the norms and standards pertaining to the construction process, building quality, performance, and most remarkably, the environmental impact. The materials used in construction have a crucial role in meeting the above requirements, and in line with this, substantial researches are in progress, in implementing scientific techniques for the selection of construction materials. Material selection is often influenced by budget constraints, local availability, and lack of technical expertise/advice. Some materials that are attractive in terms of initial cost, can have adverse effects on quality, reliability and performance, and even a catastrophic impact on the environment, during the life span of the building. So the present article tries to convince the importance of selecting material based on Life Cycle Costing (LCC), which performs the cradle-to-grave assessment of a building, at the design stage itself. The existing methods of material selection, and the introduction of LCC with details of each steps involved, and concluding remarks, are presented on the basis of review of the related literature. Each stage of construction project involves planning, design, construction, operation, maintenance and demolishing, and the associated costs should be considered to ensure the overall project costs are known. The materials used in construction have a crucial role in meeting the above requirements, and in line with this, substantial researches are in progress, in implementing scientific techniques for the selection of construction materials. Various methods have been reported for the selection of construction materials. Materials play an important role during the entire design process. At the early design stage, materials may achieve some of the required functions. Hence, designers may need to identify materials with specific functionalities in order to find feasible design concepts (2). Construction clients ask for high quality building, lower cost and shorter lead-time. The clients, who have to pay the bill, have actually very little influence over time, cost and quality. Buildings represent a large and long-lasting investment in financial terms as well as in other resources. Most commonly, initial cost (construction cost) is the main cost factor in construction and is often set to the minimum, which does not necessarily improve the lifetime performance of buildings. However, a higher initial cost might decrease total life cycle cost (LCC). It is important, therefore, to show the construction client in the early design phase the relationship between design choices and the resulting lifetime cost (3). The material selection problem has been treated extensively in the literature through many approaches, such as multi-objective optimization, ranking methods, index- based methods, and other quantitative methods like cost- benefit analysis. However, current literature in the building domain lacks a standard method that may help the decision- maker to select the appropriate materials while at the same time looking at the accomplishment of environmental goals and meeting design and budgetary requirements. This gap is observed in spite of cost being a common reason for the bankruptcy of many GB projects given that materials reach up to 20-30% of the total building cost (4). Therefore, the construction industry has to implement technique for the selection of material in the design stage, which performs the cradle-to-grave assessment of a building to avoid unnecessary cost. So the present article emphasizes the importance of selecting material based on Life Cycle Costing (LCC), at the early design stage.