Whole life cost analysis in concrete bridge tender evaluation

In the UK large sums of money are spent annually on the repair and maintenance of structures. To avoid this problem in future construction, many government and private agencies responsible for asset management have recommended that designers should develop schemes that seek to minimise whole life costs, namely construction plus maintenance costs, rather than just initial construction costs. Currently there is no standard procedure for evaluating tenders in terms of whole life costs and therefore no way of checking that this recommendation is being fully implemented. This paper describes a straightforward model that can be used to assess the whole life costs of concrete bridges exploiting alternative durability options and shows how this model could be incorporated in the tendering process.