Sustainability evaluation, life cycle assessment and facilities management for Geelong Retail Development

Value management is a technique used during the design stage to justify cost and worth of a proposal. Designer must never center only to save capital expenditure but consider holistically the whole building life which will be sustainable. Therefore, sustainability evaluation must adopt a long term view and will properly include three crucial elements: economic, social and environmental. Lack of awareness of value management during the design stage of a building project will adversely impact on the life cycle assessment (LCA) and facilities management (FM). This paper provides a review of the sustainable elements that must be considered when designing and costing a new retail development in the Geelong region of Australia and how these factors influence the whole building life. The result of this research helps to create a greater understanding of the different attributes that will affect the LCA and FM decisions made on sustainable development in this and other regional Australian cities that are undergoing major population growth.

Survival misperception, time inconsistency, and implications for life-cycle saving and welfare

Some empirical studies firmly reveal that people tend to form overly pessimistic survival expectations for relatively less distant ages and overly optimistic survival expectations for relatively more distant ages. We incorporate this observation into a life-cycle continuous time overlapping-generations model of consumption/saving with a general form for a subjective survival function. Resulting time-inconsistent optimal control problem has been analytically solved. At the micro level, time inconsistency leads to higher consumption at young and old ages, but this alone fails to improve lifetime well-being since micro-level decisions made with a lack of information about true mortality are suboptimal. In general equilibrium, however, such time inconsistent behavior with survival misperception is conducive to aggregate capital accumulation and greater equilibrium bequest income. The latter effects can produce substantial welfare gains. We also note that empirically observed old age optimistic bias is an important phenomenon, as it helps to avoid unrealistic very old-age debt accumulation within a life-cycle model. In addition, if for a given level of optimistic bias we increase early-life pessimism, this would result in slower capital accumulation, lower bequest income, and thus be detrimental to welfare. Since recent literature reports that young-age survival pessimism has grown over time, it raises some concerns.

Validating the impact of EVM on project life cycle

With the inevitable increase in size and complexity of construction projects, the need for proper control is increasing. Considering the fact that each project strives for excellence, numerous studies have been conducted over the years to measure performance and investigate factors that are really critical towards project success. Earned Value Management is a project performance evaluation technique which enables industry professionals to closely monitor project performance in both time and cost .The aim of this paper is to examine the result of proper Earned Value Management (EVM) implementation on different project life cycle (PLC) and validate the impact on project success.

The study investigates different success factors in construction industry with special focus on previous researchers’ work which studied the importance of cost control in project success especially in fragmented industry like construction, followed up with three different case studies to analyze the positive impact of EVM implementation on construction projects. Furthermore, for data triangulation purpose, case study analysis will be supported by interviews with specialists working in the UAE construction industry to cross check the outcomes of previous researches.
The research shows that EVM application on cost control in construction projects is not only a crucial management task which is a key to the success of the business but also its influence on project success depends on the time of implementation. It requires a number of up-to-date input data consistently throughout the construction phase. Assigning the right budgets, calculating accurate estimates and monitoring actual costs throughout different project stages are the three main drivers of an effective control through PLC staring from inception stage till completion. EVM proved to be of vital importance due to alarming escalation of construction costs which needs to be especially monitored and controlled. Senior management support and availability of professional staff to execute cost control systems are key factors towards successful implementation

A comprehensive framework for assessing the life-cycle energy of building construction assemblies

Building environmental design typically focuses on improvements to operational efficiencies such as building thermal performance and system efficiency. Often the impacts occurring across the other stages of a building's life are not considered or are seen as insignificant in comparison. However, previous research shows that embodied impacts can be just as important. There is limited consistent and comprehensive information available for building designers to make informed decisions in this area. Often the information that is available is from disparate sources, which makes comparison of alternative solutions unreliable. It is also important to ensure that strategies to reduce environmental impacts from one life cycle stage do not come at the expense of an increase in overall life-cycle impacts. A consistent and comprehensive framework for assessing and specifying building assemblies for enhanced environmental outcomes does not currently exist. This article presents the initial findings of a project that aims to establish a database of life cycle energy requirements for a broad range of construction assemblies, based on a comprehensive assessment framework. Life cycle energy requirements have been calculated for eight residential construction assemblies integrating an innovative embodied energy assessment technique with thermal performance modelling and ranked according to their performance. © #2010 Earthscan ISSN: 0003-8628.

The effectiveness of life-cycle pricing for consumer durables

This quasi-experimental study examines consumer reactions to including projected energy and carbon costs in print ads for a TV, using an online survey of 2566 Australian consumers. This study determines whether consumers' temporal orientation (past vs. future) moderates these reactions. Participants rate ads that include both energy and carbon costs as the most useful for buying a TV and as having higher perceived value. However, this fact does not affect likelihood of purchase. Participants with a high temporal orientation to the past react less favorably to ads that include carbon costs. This study shows that informing consumers about life-cycle costs does not substantially affect purchase decisions for durable goods but affects perceptions of value and usefulness of pricing information in ads.

An early-stage design decision-support tool for selecting building assemblies to minimise a building's life cycle energy demand

The significant effects of the building industry on the natural environment are well documented and improving the environmental performance of buildings is an on-going challenge. This is particularly the case for projects with restrictive budgets and timelines and because many existing environmental assessment tools are designed to be used too late in the design process. The use of tools during the early design stages may assist in achieving greater improvements in a building’s environmental performance. However, user-friendly tools with the ability to comprehensively compare environmental information between various building assemblies and materials, which can be easily adopted during the early design stages of a project, are not readily available. This paper presents the progress to date in developing a tool which supports building designers in identifying and selecting preferred building assemblies with the aim of minimising a building’s life cycle energy demand. The tool is based on comprehensive energy performance data for a broad range of building assemblies across all Australian climate zones. Allowing for adjustments to a set of pre-defined and user-defined assemblies the designer is able to see how assemblies perform in relation to each other. This provides valuable information to support decision-making relating to minimising the life cycle energy demand of buildings.

Do corporate policies follow a life-cycle?

We examine whether corporate investment, financing, and cash policies are interdependent and follow a predictable pattern in line with the firm life-cycle. We find that investments and equity issuance decrease with firm life-cycle, while debt issuance and cash holdings increase in the introduction and growth stages and decrease in the mature and shake-out/decline stages of the firm's life-cycle. These results are robust after using various proxies for life-cycle and controlling for firm, CEO and board level characteristics. Collectively, our results show that corporate policies follow a firm life-cycle.