Abstract
To optimally maintain buildings and other built infrastructure, the costs of managing them during their entire existence—that is, lifecycle costs—must be taken into account. However, due to technological improvements, developers now build more high-rise and high-performance buildings, meaning that new approaches to estimating lifecycle costs are needed. Meanwhile, an accelerating process of industrialization around the world means that global warming is also accelerating, and the damage caused by natural disasters due to climate change is increasing. However, the costs of losses related to such hazards are rarely incorporated into lifecycle-cost estimation techniques. Accordingly, this study explored the relationship between, on the one hand, some known parameters of natural disasters, such as earthquakes, high winds, and/or flooding, and on the other hand, the data on exceptional maintenance costs, represented by gross loss costs, generated by a large international hotel chain from 2007 to 2017. The regression model used revealed a correlation between heavy rain and insurance-claim payouts. This and other results can usefully inform safety and design guidelines for policymakers, both in disaster management and real estate, as well as in insurance companies
Highlights
As the sizes and heights of buildings continue to increase, new approaches for estimating and managing their lifecycle costs have become necessary [1,2]
We investigated the relationship between natural disasters and the operation and management costs of a hotel chain that is currently one of the largest of its kind in the world, comprising more than two dozen brands and over 5000 properties around the globe
The research method proposed in this paper offers an opportunity to incorporate loss costs arising from natural hazards into the lifecycle cost, by relating operation and management costs to prior natural disasters
Summary
As the sizes and heights of buildings continue to increase, new approaches for estimating and managing their lifecycle costs have become necessary [1,2]. An increasing number of studies are being conducted on buildings’ social impacts, including numbers of fatalities during disasters; environmental ones such as CO2 emissions during deconstruction/demolition; and economic ones such as natural-disaster-related repair costs [3,4,5,6]. Due to the increased likelihood of various types of damage related to global warming and to public demand for greater urban-system resilience, effective estimation of such future costs should comprehensively incorporate those factors that may require structural repair or complete replacement [8]. Despite the profound impact that the cosmetic appearance of a building can have on hotel revenues, and despite the long lifespans and considerable age of many hotel buildings, their natural-disaster management tends to be passive rather than proactive, unsystematic, and poorly funded relative to their overall budgets [10,11]
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