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Introduction
An owner's perspective of building design has changed over time. In today's critical economy, expectations have gone beyond design and construction of a facility. Owners have broadened their perspective to include operations, maintenance, repair, replacement and disposal costs. The American Society for Testing and Materials sets a series of standards for building economics such as life cycle cost analysis (LCCA), benefit to cost ratio and internal rate of return (IRR) to assess the total life cost of a building.
LCCA is an economic evaluation technique that determines the total cost of owning and operating a facility over a period of time. LCCA is a useful tool that facilitates controlling initial and future cost of building ownership, and it can be implemented at any level of the design process for evaluating existing building systems. The [28] National Institute of Standards and Technology Handbook 135 (1996) defines life cycle cost (LCC) as "the total discounted dollar cost of owning, operating, maintaining and disposing of a building or a building system" over a period of time.
In spite of LCCA benefits, its adoption has been relatively slow ([26] Korpi and Ala-Risku, 2008; [27] Lindholm and Suomala, 2004). [4] Arditi and Messiha (1999) and [27] Lindholm and Suomala (2004) indicated that the amount of cross case studies in the field of LCCA is extremely low as most of them are limited to a single industry. LCCA is not utilised to its full potential because of the problems associated with life cycle costing practices such as scarce, inconsistent data collection and insufficient collaboration between stakeholders ([27] Lindholm and Suomala, 2004). In construction, [12] El-Haram et al. (2002) identified the lack of reliable and consistent data on the execution of building elements and services as the major hurdle in LCCA implementation in construction. As a result, most of the research is devoted to water resources and transportation projects ([10] Cole and Sterner, 2000; [3] Arditi and Messiha, 1996).
Limited research has been conducted regarding the usefulness of LCCA techniques in the area of facilities management. One potential use of LCCA is its use as a predictor of facility cost performance. If this potential is recognisable, then it would elevate the use of LCCA to an asset management tool for...