Sustainability, Whole Life Costs, and Information and Communication Technologies: A Review of Published Works

This paper reviews research work that has attempted to assess the financial benefits of adopting sustainable design and construction practices, and identifies a connection to information and communication technology (ICT) used to facilitate the adoption of those practices. A review of the literature found that: researchers disagree on the precise impact of sustainability upon the whole life costs (WLC) of buildings; the impact of sustainability upon usage costs tends to be ignored despite their considerable size; and the use and adoption of ICT tools remains costly, limited and inefficient in sustainable projects. Future research needs therefore to focus on: investigating a sufficient number of conventional and sustainable buildings, assessing all types of long-term costs incurred in those buildings, evaluating buildings' usage costs in more details, and using empirical documented cost data whenever these are available. Future research also needs to show ways of improving sustainable design and construction processes by: assessing the specific impact of ICT tools on related processes, assessing the collaborative decision-making process in general, and developing a comprehensive model to ensure effective adoption and implementation of ICT solutions that have shown to improve design and construction processes.