Breaking through the first cost barriers of sustainable planning, design, and construction

The research integrates elements of the bodies of knowledge for sustainability, planning, design, and construction to create an understanding of green project first cost drivers. It extends conceptual models for sustainable infrastructure and the built environment process by creating a framework based linkage to analyze first cost impacts of sustainable project planning, design, and construction decisions. The framework functions as an analytical bridge between the built environment process and sustainability and is the principal contribution of this research. Through a preliminary analysis of fourteen projects, the work draws out relevant planning, materials and methods, and estimating and scheduling best practices and guiding principles. The work then proposes a first cost impact framework derived from the preliminary analysis as a decision support tool and tests the framework using an expert system derived linguistic database. The test results support the functionality of the framework. The test linguistic database was developed through an interdisciplinary professional expert practitioner interview process using common green project planning, design and construction strategies. The qualitative, interpretative, multi-criteria analysis of the data used fuzzy set theory and presents findings helpful in understanding green project first cost drivers. The work concludes with an assessment and a discussion of parallel research, and ten recommended areas for further research.