Life Cycle Design Criteria for Design-Build Transportation Projects

Departments of Transportation prioritize the completion of new construction projects because the law prohibits the award of projects without sufficient funding. However, the true priority for the nation's infrastructure is in funding the enormous backlog of maintenance and repair projects. These projects are a function of the quality of a project's design with respect to life cycle cost, and thus, the paradigm for transportation design should shift from "minimize first cost" to "minimize life cycle cost." The recent widespread use of design-build in the transportation sector creates a opportunity to maximize life cycle design issues through a design and price competition that is based on life cycle factors. This paper reports the results of a study to identify and analyze current methodologies for establishing appropriate design criteria using Life Cycle Cost Analysis (LCCA) for transportation projects. It found that there are a number of promising approaches currently in use for pavements. These methodologies have been successfully applied to design techniques that seek to define the most cost efficient design using LCCA. The paper shows how three existing studies used techniques to establish a uniform set of LCCA-based design criteria and demonstrates that these three proven methodologies can be applied to evaluating design-build technical and price proposals to achieve the best value with regard to life cycle cost. The paper concludes that public owners can easily utilize existing LCCA methodologies as the basis for DB design and evaluation criteria on future transportation projects.