Whole Life Costing

is important to have the knowledge about the connections between different costs and different surface characteristics of a pavement. The costs are for the road, traffic safety, road user and environment etc. The surface characteristics are things like friction, micro- and macro structure, iuts, evenness, cracks, sloping and drainage etc. • It is important to have the knowledge about why and how the surface characteristics changes during the life time of a road construction depending on traffic, water, frost and heat etc. You need a reliable deterioration model for this in order to get reliable results. • It is important to get knowledge about all the costs for a road during its lifetime in order to choose the constructive design and maintcnancc strategy, which have the lowest costs. "All costs" shall include costs for the road, user and society as accidents and environment etc. • The calculations in order to get these costs are so complicated, that you need a computer systelil, a Whole Life Costing system (WLC). • A WLC system ought to consist of separate modules for different calculations and be constructed in windows environment. • There is a trend in the world today to use more quality assurance and functional demands in road construction. This makes it also necessary to put a value on these soft factors. • A WLC system is today a great help for the choice of the most economic solution for investment, repair and rehabilitation work and maintenance strategy for roads in many countries. • A WLC system can also be a great help to put a value on the benefit of using new materials, new techniques and own constructive solutions from contractors in a tender.