Prediction of Life-Cycle Expenditure for Different Categories of Council Buildings

The prediction of the performance or service life of a building system and their components is a very complex task. Although many papers related to material and component durability have been published over the past two decades, they had a negligible impact on the development of an effective approach for durability design. ISO presents a valuable methodology based on the factor method in the area of service life estimation but it requires considerable local knowledge about degradation of components and materials. The factor method on the other hand is fairly simple but identifies the main parameters influencing service life. The result, however, is only a single figure for service life and does not take into account the variability of the processes involved. A lot of work is being done in the area of service life prediction, but there is very little that can be readily used by building asset managers. Hence, there is a great need to develop a simple model which can be easily calibrated and used. The model proposed here can be easily implemented by practitioners and would be of benefit to infrastructure managers of city councils.