Computerized Life Cycle Cost Analysis

ABSTRACT: In North Cyprus most of the buildings are being constructed without an economic analysis of costs for the whole life of the buildings. This causes the wasting of resources and unnecessary costs to the project during construction, maintenance and operation. Economic evaluation has a big significance for construction projects, in order to select the optimum design alternatives. Life cycle costing (LCC) is a method being widely used for such an evaluation of construction projects. Most owners have little experience or knowledge about economic analysis of design alternatives for selecting the best design alternatives. This study involves; highlighting the techniques of life cycle costing method and investigation of life cycle costing of the selected project “Student Activity Center building at the Eastern Mediterranean University in North Cyprus” in view of developing a computer system in MS Visual Basic for analyzing of life cycle costing of such building. The Results of manual calculation and results of developed computer system were compared and both results were found to be similar, a difference of approximately 0.0015 percentages was obtained and the developed program finished the operation in only 27 minutes. However, the duration of the same calculations by hand of four estimators on average was approximately 8 hours. That means, the program is almost 17 times more time-efficient than manual life cycle cost calculations. This indicates that, develop computer system is working and reliable and application of LCC techniques to the Student Activity Center project is beneficial for the owner as well as to the user. Keywords: Economic analysis, Life cycle costing. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………