Life Cycle Cost Analysis In Pavement Design

This Interim Technical Bulletin recommends procedures for conducting Life-Cycle Cost Analysis (LCCA) of pavements, provides detailed procedures to determine work zone user costs, and introduces a probabilistic approach to account for the uncertainty associated with LCCA inputs.

This bulletin recommends procedures for conducting Life Cycle Cost Analysis (LCCA) of pavements, provides detailed procedures to determine work zone user costs, and introduces a probabilistic approach to account for the uncertainty associated with LCCA inputs.

Life-cycle cost analysis (LCCA) is an engineering economic analysis tool useful in comparing the relative merit of competing pavement design alternatives. The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation shares their experience with LCCA.

Given the aging of highway pavements, high traffic levels, and uncertainty of sustained preservation funding, there is a need for balanced decision-making tools such as LCCA to ensure long-term and cost-effective pavement investments. It has been shown in past research that more effective long-term pavement investment could be made at lower cost using LCCA. Current LCCA-based pavement design and preservation practice in Indiana could be further enhanced by due consideration of user costs. Also, the existing FHWA LCCA software could be further enhanced for increased versatility, flexibility, and more specific applicability to the needs of Indiana, particularly with regard to treatment cost estimation and development of alternative feasible preservation strategies (rehabilitation and maintenance types and timings). The study documented/developed several sets of alternative pavement design and preservation strategies consistent with existing and foreseen Indiana practice. The preservation strategies were developed using two alternative criteria – trigger values (pavement condition thresholds) and predefined time intervals (based on treatment service lives) and are intended for further study before they can be used for practice. These strategies were developed on the basis of historical pavement management data, existing INDOT Design Manual standards, and a survey of experts. The study also found that with a few enhancements, FHWA’s current LCCA methodology and software (RealCost) could be adapted for use by INDOT for purposes of decision support for pavement investments and proceeded to make such enhancements.

Featuring sixteen technical papers and two keynote addresses presented at the August 2000 conference in Honolulu, this book covers a range of studies on life-cycle cost analysis, design, maintenance, and management of civil infrastructure systems. Topics include conceptual design of structural syste

Life-Cycle Civil Engineering contains the papers presented at the First International Symposium on Life-Cycle Civil Engineering (IALCCE 08), held in Villa Monastero, Varenna, Lake Como, Italy, 10-14 June, 2008. It consists of a book and a CD-ROM containing 150 papers, including eight keynote papers and 142 technical contributions from 28 countries.

Accompanying CD-ROM contains software, Guidance manual, User manual, and appendixes to report.

Design related project level pavement management - Economic evaluation of alternative pavement design strategies - Reliability / - Pavement design procedures for new construction or reconstruction : Design requirements - Highway pavement structural design - Low-volume road design / - Pavement design procedures for rehabilitation of existing pavements : Rehabilitation concepts - Guides for field data collection - Rehabilitation methods other than overlay - Rehabilitation methods with overlays / - Mechanistic-empirical design procedures.