ABSTRACT

The essential aspect in assessing the cost effectiveness of consequential savings and costs of any given construction alternative is the identification of all the relevant inputs and outputs and quantification, when possible, of these as costs and benefits to facilitate informed decision making. The most important time to do this is at the value engineering exercises undertaken towards the end of the design cycle, where cost-cutting discussions often disregard the full design intent and lead to decisions that result in subpar building performance. Operation, maintenance and repair costs amount to over three times the cost of initial construction. Conventional cost-benefit analyses of resilience measures are heavily loss-centric. They tend to weigh up the certain cost of investing in resilience against the uncertain benefit of avoided losses and this can result in decision makers underestimating the benefits.