Life Cycle Costing Analysis: Implementation in Buildings in the Phase of Use – Systematic Review

Abstract

Life Cycle Cost Analysis (LCCA) consists of a way to obtain costs during the construction, maintenance, use and operation, and building disposal phases. It aims at better decision-making concerning the allocation of financial resources and analysis of the point of environmental view. Although created a few decades ago, LCCA still does not represent a consolidated decision support way in the building management process. In this sense, this work presents a systematic review of the main issues related to implementing LCCA in buildings during maintenance and retrofit situations. We conducted searches in the Web of Science and Scopus databases based on steps involved in the PRISMA protocol. The results present the main application ways, the adopted discount rates that strongly influence Life Cycle Cost (LCC) results, the approaches associated with LCCA, and the main barriers and opportunities for the LCCA application. We conclude that, although there is a long history of publications on the subject, there is still no consolidation in the methodology used. A relevant gap is the absence of an integrated methodology of decision support management based on controlling life-cycle cost, which considers the profile of building use, energy efficiency improvements through retrofits, and optimized maintenance of resource management. Additionally, with other approaches and techniques, more benefits and results with greater robustness can be obtained.