Development of a life cycle costing system for Light Rail Transit construction projects

The need for Light Rail Transit (LRT) in Korea has substantially increased as a result of the heavy traffic congestion in large cities such as Seoul. In Korea, most of the LRT construction projects have been achieved with the help of private sector investment, and the private sector companies that wished to participate in such projects had to make a rapid decision regarding their participation by conducting a thorough economic analysis before the beginning of the project. In other words, to ensure the success of the project, would-be participants had to estimate the precise amount of certain Life Cycle Costs (LCC), such as initial investment costs (construction cost) and maintenance costs. Experience, historical data, and know-how regarding previous LRT construction projects were needed to estimate the LCC of the project, but the private sector in Korea lacks the historical data and proper systems to support such decision-making. In this research, a life cycle costing system for the LRT construction project was developed to support feasibility studies on such projects. Construction cost was determined by the type of structure, its scale, and the methods of construction, so the factors related to the construction cost had to be defined in advance, and a database that included related historical data also had to be built. In this project, the main factors that influence structures such as bridges and tunnels are defined, and a database related to unit costs is built based on the existing studies and databases. The LCC analysis process and the LCC model of LRT arc defined through a study of existing research. An algorithm for the LCC analysis of LRT was made through a study on the analysis of uncertainty factors and cost breakdown structures that are adaptable to LRT. The developed system, which analyzes the construction cost and LCC cash flow, can considerably improve the efficiency of LRT LCC analysis.