Study of Life Cycle Cost Analysis and Value Engineering and their use in UAE

Abstract

When planning a project, the main stakeholders' concern is always about the potential for failures, defects, delays, overruns, and conflicts that the project might face. According to studies and statistics, most projects take around 20% longer than scheduled to complete and frequently go much over budget. There are several techniques to plan a project effectively, but they all need a thorough strategy, managing, supervision, and collaboration. Life cycle cost analysis and value engineering are some of the most recently used techniques that evaluate and analyse all costs related to the project over its service life and give the essential project functions at the lowest possible cost. This research calculates the life cycle cost of a residential building in Sharjah city, in UAE over 40 years life span. Including the three main phases: initial cost, operation & maintenance cost and decommissioning cost. And then the same calculation was done for 60 years of life span for the same project. in the end, a comparison between both cases is made to find out which case will be more financially beneficial. Results show that investing more money in the initial phase, mainly the construction phase, to improve the materials and construction quality would increase the service life by up to 20 years. which will result in more profit to the owners/stakeholders taking into consideration safety requirements.