Panwar, A and Jha, K N (2017) Trade-off between life cycle cost and greenhouse gas emission in construction projects. In: Chan, P W and Neilson, C J (eds.) Proceedings of 33rd Annual ARCOM Conference, 4-6 September 2017, Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, UK.
Abstract
In the past, sustainability was not a major concern for different construction stakeholders such as: clients, consultants, designers and contractors. However, with increasing social and environmental challenges, sustainability in project management began to gain importance. Sustainability challenges brought forth the need to develop and implement projects in which Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) was recommended. In a project, Life Cycle Costing (LCC) provides a decision support in selecting a suitable alternative to execute a work package based on its financial benefits as opposed to LCA, in which decision is based on the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) of a product or assembly. Application of LCC is limited in construction projects because it is time intensive, costly, computationally exhaustive, less standardized, and its benefits are not well recognized. Hence there is a need to combine the life cycle costing and the cost on account of environment impact so that the stakeholders can appreciate the LCA in a better manner. Accordingly an attempt is made here to integrate the LCC with EIA so that the financial benefits and sustainability in construction projects are understood simultaneously. For this a case study is taken up which demonstrates the trade-off between the LCC and EIA in terms of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emission in CO2-equivalent. The LCC and GHG for different construction activities using different resource combinations are evaluated using the ATHENA impact estimator 5.2 and the Genetic Algorithm (GA) based optimization model is used to establish a trade-off between LCC and GHG. The proposed model may help the stakeholders to study the long term analysis of construction projects not limited to construction phase alone.
| Item Type: | Conference Paper (Paper) |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | life cycle; greenhouse gas; sustainability; genetic algorithm; trade-off |
| Index terms: | construction project, greenhouse gas emission, estimator, construction phase, costing, greenhouse gas, project management, sustainability challenge, package, case study, genetic algorithm, decision support, life cycle, construction activity, life cycle assessment, environmental impact assessment, life cycle cost, designer |
| Subjects: | value management, climate science, environmental issues, environmental impact, profession, data collection methods, project delivery, contractual arrangements, construction operations, project management theory and practice, production management, accounting and finance, research methods, algorithms, environmental health, decision analysis |
| Topics: | Project Management, Research Practice, Cost Management, Sustainability, Procurement, Roles and Professions, Risk Management, Digital Applications, Site Management |
| Descriptive scope: | 3 PCE |
N.B. Descriptive scope is a count of how many of the five facets of empirical research are indicated by the words used in title, abstract and keywords. It is not intended as a judgement on the research; merely a count of the kind of word we would expect to indicate Phenomenon, Concepts, Theoretical framing, Empirical techniques, Analytical techniques. If all five are present, then a code of “5 PCTEA” will indicate this. If you feel the coding for this record is questionable, we welcome discussion around the terms we matched or the way we categorized them. The facet you would expect may not be coded, or a facet may be coded inappropriately. This can also bear on a larger question, of which facets should be treated as defining in construction management research. Please get in touch, and we will look at it. More details here