Future-proofing and monitoring capital investments needs throughout the life cycle of building projects

Abstract

It is increasingly important justify not only the initial capital investments needed at an early stage of a building project, but also all other subsequent costs throughout the building life-cycle. These involve an understanding of the running costs in the use stage and also appropriate long-term capital investment planning of future rehabilitation investments needs. To achieve this, several research efforts have been made to increase the understanding of complex building system and subsystems degradation processes in the post-construction period and to develop life-cycle-cost databases. But there is a lack of expedite decision support tools that can assist the future-proofing of design decisions at early stage of the building life-cycle and link those to the economic life-cycle performance. This paper presents an indicator-based approach (Building Investment Index, BII), which also allows the monitoring of the economic life-cycle performance of building projects at any moment in time. BII is applied in a case study of 166 public school building constructed in Portugal since 1942 and totally refurbished in 2009. Post-construction investment costs are estimated until 2071. It is show and proven how to use BII to future-proof decisions and to monitor and optimize long-term investment plans for building systems, subsystems and elements.