Life-cycle cost estimation of a building structure: An example of partition walls

The growing pressure to optimise construction investment costs from the life-cycle perspective inevitably leads to efforts to seek new solutions that will facilitate informed decision-making in the early stages of the construction project. Awareness of the importance of considering future operation and demolition costs emphasises the shortcomings related to the possibility of making accurate predictions/estimations of such costs, which will become apparent in the future. To address this research gap, an innovative approach of life-cycle cost modelling on the level of individual structures of the building is presented. The model provides users with information on the costs of available technical solutions resulting from the requirements of the investor at a specific stage of the construction project. In this way, it helps investors optimise their building projects and to find the most economical solutions. Specifically, this model is assembled for the purpose of selecting a suitable partition wall and, therefore, it takes into consideration specific characteristics relating to this particular type of structure. The results indicate diversity in partition wall structural design variants at the early stage of the project. Since the ability to influence future costs decreases as the project progresses, the model allows capturing LCC perspective even if only a construction study is available without more detailed technical and economic information. The presented model aims to contribute to the higher performance of construction projects in the planning phase from the perspective of LCC and investors’/owners’ point of view.