By 2020, the Danish government will require mandatory evaluation of Lifecycle Costs (LCC) for new buildings, as opposed to only considering procurement costs. The maturing Danish building industry sector looks towards LCC as a source of competitive advantage. LCCbyg is a tool released by the Danish authorities to calculate lifecycle costs. Potential for automation is investigated, as currently, design model quantities need to be manually converted to facilitate the calculations in LCCbyg.
Multiple methods exist for calculating procurement costs at an object level. The same cannot be said about operational costs, where methods still rely simply on building areas. The generic approximations fail to account for object quantity, type, and materials. Therefore, the objective of this study was twofold; firstly, to investigate the potential for basing cleaning costs on objects, and secondly, to develop and test a data transfer method, integrating autonomous software packages for design and costing.
The involved stakeholders debated the potential risks and benefits of the object-oriented approach. Regardless of the procedure, transfer automation was deemed useful. A semi-automated data transfer was tested on an existing, and a design model of two office buildings using Building Information Models (BIMs) and a Visual Programming Language (VPL).
To conclude, the stakeholders saw the benefits of basing operational data on objects, while also pointed at obstacles concerning a lack of model detail in the early design phase. The proposed approach transferred Revit object quantities to the LCCbyg XML schema, and the operational cleaning cost data has been visualized using PowerBI. The method requires further integration with cost databases and other subsets of LCC calculations to be considered a complete solution.