Generic approach to minimize whole life costs in the building industry

Although whole life costing (WLC) is playing an increasingly important part in evaluating the procurement of building projects, the lack of reliable and consistent data for accurate WLC analysis is still a serious concern. This paper presents the preliminary outputs of a research project which is supported by the EPSRC at the University of Dundee. It seeks to quantify the benefits of applying Integrated Logistic Support, ILS, at the design stage of building projects and its impact on whole life costs and performance. The development of a consistent and comprehensive WLC data structure and application of the “theory of significance”, Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) and Reliability Centred Maintenance (RCM) to identify the most cost-effective and applicable maintenance tasks in order to minimize WLC of building elements are discussed.