The role of service life planning in construction industry; an exploratory review

Abstract

The aim is to present a review of the scientific literature as regards service life planning and durability in buildings, infrastructure and their parts. The review focused on studies and works related to two main categories: the first related to the basic information on service life planning for buildings, the second, related to case studies and applications of service life planning in buildings. Results reveal that as regards theory and basic information on service life the studies mainly focus on studies on specific methods and models on service life planning in buildings and their components, as for applications and case studies, these largely focus on life cycle assessments to ascertain durability and environmental impacts for various materials and constructive components. It is concluded that the estimation of a building’s service life not only comes in handy to plan its durability, but also because it is very useful when studies on Life-cycle assessment on buildings and their components are needed.