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Recently, there has been a shift toward the embodied energy assessment of buildings. However, the impact of material service life on the life-cycle embodied energy has received little attention. We aimed to address this knowledge gap, particularly in the context of the UAE and investigated the embodied energy associated with the use of concrete and other materials commonly used in residential buildings in the hot desert climate of the UAE.

Using input–output based hybrid analysis, we quantified the life-cycle embodied energy of a villa in the UAE with over 50 years of building life using the average, minimum, and maximum material service life values. Mathematical calculations were performed using MS Excel, and a detailed bill of quantities with >170 building materials and components of the villa were used for investigation.

For the base case, the initial embodied energy was 57% (7390.5 GJ), whereas the recurrent embodied energy was 43% (5,690 GJ) of the life-cycle embodied energy based on average material service life values. The proportion of the recurrent embodied energy with minimum material service life values was increased to 68% of the life-cycle embodied energy, while it dropped to 15% with maximum material service life values.

The findings provide new data to guide building construction in the UAE and show that recurrent embodied energy contributes significantly to life-cycle energy demand. Further, the study of material service life variations provides deeper insights into future building material specifications and management considerations for building maintenance.

The recurrent embodied energy (REE) is the energy consumed in the maintenance, replacement and retrofit processes of a facility. The purpose of this paper was to analyze the relationship of REE with the service life and life cycle embodied energy. The amount of variation in the reported REE values is also determined and discussed.

A qualitative approach that is known as the literature based discovery (LBD) was adopted. Existing literature was surveyed to gather case studies and to analyze the reported values of REE.

The reported values of REE showed considerable variation across referred studies. It was also found that the reported REE values demonstrated a moderate positive correlation with the service life but a very strong positive correlation with the life cycle embodied energy of both the residential and commercial facilities.

This review paper pointed out the importance of the maintenance and replacement processes in reducing the life cycle energy use in a facility. Future research could focus on performing case studies to evaluate this relationship.

The findings highlight the significance of REE in reducing the life cycle energy impacts of a facility. As facility managers routinely deal with maintenance and replacement processes, they hold an important responsibility of reducing the life cycle energy.

The findings of the paper would motivate the facilities management professionals to prefer long service life materials and components during the postconstruction phases of a built facility.

If sustainable construction is to be secured as a response to sovereign governments’ acknowledgement of global warming, then there is an urgent need to focus on both the built environment’s facility and asset serviceability and service life characteristics and their management. Includes building life management, life based procurement practice together with the product’s associated life care needs. Adopting such a practice would permit and encourage client organisations to actively improve their building stocks and facility portfolios. In a sustainable sense too, both the asset and facility organisations should seek improved building space flexibility and a whole life quality set within some environmental or life cycle measure or benchmark. Pursuing such sustainable goals means that one must also both embrace the respective project’s building material and component supply chain and include its respective waste stream’s impact at that point of the product’s life time including its dismission stage. Finally, both in a sustainability and in a business excellence sense, all organisations need to find ways to bring their respective portfolio into a CO₂‐serviceability framework and keep a watching brief on developing their responses to an inevitable carbon based taxation future.

This paper seeks to describe the development and testing of a depreciated replacement cost model for a portfolio of corporate real estate assets.

A model was developed in Microsoft Excel, using depreciation rates and adjustment factors derived from readily‐available tables applied to elemental building costs. The model was applied to an actual property portfolio, with the costs of data‐gathering being estimated.

The developed model proved to be effective in both planning and managing maintenance and capital expenditure, with application to life‐cycle maintenance and replacement decisions. The model was successfully used to conduct a replacement cost valuation on the test portfolio. It was found that the cost of the initial detailed data‐gathering could be repaid in a relatively short time by use of the model.

The methodology appears to be widely applicable to corporate real estate portfolios, with depreciation rates and methods, and levels of detail of components used being able to be changed to suit individual country and portfolio circumstances.

Provides a model useful for harnessing basic property information into a sophisticated day‐to‐day and strategic portfolio management tool.

Both financial and non-financial functions are imbedded in the life-cycle management activities of building assets. These functions provide relevant information for the establishment of operational and maintenance strategies and for decision-making processes related with the timing of major repairs, replacements and rehabilitations. The purpose of this paper is to focus on improving the alignment of financial and non-financial functions related to the recognition that the service potential of buildings should be appropriately funded as it is consumed over its life cycle.

Authors undertake an analysis of depreciation rates used to accommodate a systematic allocation of the depreciable amount of building assets over its useful life. Different depreciation approaches and calculation methods are explored. A case study of a school building portfolio is used to debate situations of misalignment of financial and non-financial depreciation rates. Data mining methods including decision tree and clustering are used to predict equivalent functional depreciation rates of buildings system and subsystems and promote an enhanced alignment with regulated financial depreciation rates toward an optimized life-cycle management of the school building portfolio.

Historical data show the relevance of considering technical and functional characteristics of the building system and their subsystems (landscaping; structure; external elevations and roofs; interior divisions; and services and equipment) when determining depreciation rates for the building assets The case study showed a misalignment of equivalent functional and financial depreciation rates used in the life-cycle management activities of the school building portfolio ranging between 1/1.26 for external elevations and roofs and 1/5.21 for landscaping.

Buildings initial technical and functional attributes are affected with its wear, aging or decay, causing loss of value until they reach end-of-life. This paper demonstrates the impact of the different interpretations of the concept of useful life and the subsequent misalignment that it generates between financial functions based on financial depreciation rates and non-financial functions based on historical data and the functional equivalent (technical and functional) depreciation rates. Economic data of 158 public school buildings constructed in Portugal since the 1940s, that sound life-cycle thinking enhances the alignment of both financial and non-financial functions.

Crucial transition of the Indian residential building sector into a low-emission economy require an in-depth understanding of the potentials for retrofitting the existing building stock. There are, however, limited studies that have recognised the interdependencies and trade-offs in the embodied energy and life cycle impact assessment of retrofit interventions. This research appraises the life cycle assessment and embodied energy output of a residential building in India to assess the environmental implications of selected retrofit scenarios.

This study utilises a single case study building project in South India to assess the effectiveness and impact of three retrofit scenarios based on life cycle assessment (LCA) and embodied energy (EE) estimates. The LCA was conducted using SimaPro version 9.3 and with background data from Ecoinvent database version 3.81. The EE estimates were calculated using material coefficients from relevant databases in the published literature. Monte Carlo Simulation is then used to allow for uncertainties in the estimates for the scenarios.

The three key findings that materialized from the study are as follows: (1) the retrofitting of Indian residential buildings could achieve up to 20% reduction in the life cycle energy emissions, (2) the modification of the building envelope and upgrading of the building service systems could suffice in providing optimum operational energy savings, if the electricity from the grid is sourced from renewable plants, and (3) the production of LEDs and other building services systems has the highest environmental impacts across a suite of LCA indicators.

The retrofitting of residential buildings in India will lead to better and improved opportunities to meet the commitments in the Paris Climate Change Agreement and will lead to enhanced savings for building owners.

The purpose of this paper is to present research on vulnerability and service life indexes applied to cultural heritage buildings. The construction and rehabilitation industry is concerned with the maintenance of monuments and reducing the economic costs of urgent interventions by taking preventive conservation action in historic cities. By applying a vulnerability index or analyzing the service life of buildings, it is possible to reduce risk and optimize the identification, evaluation and prioritization of urgent monument restoration tasks in a city or a region to establish preventive conservation policies.

This research sets out the concepts of vulnerability and service life, focusing on their methodologies in comparison with other techniques for building diagnosis, discussing the differences between indexes that measure the vulnerability and service life of buildings.

The vulnerability of three churches in Seville (Spain) was studied by means of their vulnerability index, based on Delphi analysis, and the service life of these buildings was also assessed, based on artificial intelligence tools. Delphi and artificial intelligence tools allow us to compare and dovetail different scenarios and expert opinions. The degree of each monument’s conservation is defined as its vulnerability index, which is an indirect function of deterioration levels. The service life of buildings, on the other hand, includes the assessment of vulnerability and hazards.

This study is useful for stakeholders, including small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and policymakers, as an important reference on diagnosis, including updated, inexpensive and sustainable methodologies to manage the conservation of monuments, which are easy to implement in developed and developing countries. The application of vulnerability and/or service life indicators is crucial to ensuring the sustainability and improvement of maintenance carried out on cultural heritage buildings.

This study details new approaches based on artificial intelligence and Delphi analysis to prioritize preventive conservation actions in a city or region.

The calculation of buildings’ carbon footprint (CFP) is an important basis for formulating energy-saving and emission-reduction plans for building. As an important building type, there is currently no model that considers the time factor to accurately calculate the CFP of hospital building throughout their life cycle. This paper aims to establish a CFP calculation model that covers the life cycle of hospital building and considers time factor.

On the basis of field and literature research, the basic framework is built using dynamic life cycle assessment (DLCA), and the gray prediction model is used to predict the future value. Finally, a CFP model covering the whole life cycle has been constructed and applied to a hospital building in China.

The results applied to the case show that the CO₂ emission in the operation stage of the hospital building is much higher than that in other stages, and the total CO₂ emission in the dynamic and static analysis operation stage accounts for 83.66% and 79.03%, respectively; the difference of annual average emission of CO₂ reached 28.33%. The research results show that DLCA is more accurate than traditional static life cycle assessment (LCA) when measuring long-term objects such as carbon emissions in the whole life cycle of hospital building.

This research established a carbon emission calculation model that covers the life cycle of hospital building and considered time factor, which enriches the research on carbon emission of hospital building, a special and extensive public building, and dynamically quantifies the resource consumption of hospital building in the life cycle. This paper provided a certain reference for the green design, energy saving, emission reduction and efficient use of hospital building, obviously, the limitation is that this model is only applicable to hospital building.

Obsolescence is a decline or loss of utility of an object, building or product. Different types of building obsolescence decrease buildings’ utility and shorten their service life. The purpose of this paper is identification of building obsolescence types and the relevant factors that affect buildings to become obsolete. It is also intended to categorise building obsolescence types to provide a contribution towards increasing building service life and delivering sustainability.

A systematic literature review is applied to conduct this research. It follows five steps: (1) formulating the research question; (2) locating studies; (3) selecting and evaluating relevant studies; (4) analysing the findings; (5) reporting and making use of the results.

Via this study, it is revealed that there are 33 types of building obsolescence. They are clustered in 10 categories regarding their conceptual and causing aspects and are presented based on their recurrence in the literature. According to the findings, economic obsolescence (including economic, financial and market obsolescence types) and functional obsolescence (including functional, use and utility obsolescence types) are the most remarkable categories.

Investigating the literature makes it clear that building obsolescence types have been studied intermittently with infrequent profound exploration of the relationship between them. This paper presents a comprehensive identification of building obsolescence types and introduces obsolescence categories that classify connected obsolescence types. It is a new framework for further studies on building obsolescence to find more effective prevention strategies to mitigate social, economic and environmental consequences of building obsolescence.

The benefits of sustainability and green building practices in facility management are well established. Reduction in energy consumption, productivity increases, waste reduction, and many other beneficial effects of sustainability can be quantified and presented to an organisation's leadership in order to defend sustainable practices and their positive effect on the bottom line. Many of the positive economic effects do not show up immediately, however. One must take a long‐term view of most sustainable practices and carefully evaluate green alternatives to traditional construction, operating and maintenance methodologies. Once the life‐cycle cost (LCC) and total cost of ownership (TCO) are taken into account, an organisation can develop a much clearer picture of the benefits of sustainable practices. The facility manager is in a unique position to view the entire process and is often the leader of the only group that has influence over the entire life cycle of a facility. Therefore, the facility manager often becomes the proponent of sustainable and green practices. Armed with the proper financial and strategic planning tools, the facility manager can create long‐lasting value to the organisation by developing, implementing and maintaining sustainable facility practices.