1. Introduction

According to the definition of ISO 14040, life cycle refers to the continuous and interrelated stage of the product system, which generally starts from the acquisition of raw materials or products from natural resources and ends with the final treatment. It considers the planning, design, production, distribution, operation, use, maintenance, and recycling of the product, from the initial or design phase of the product, as shown in Figure 1.

Existing life cycle methods include life cycle cost analysis (LCCA) and life cycle assessment (LCA). Similar to the engineering budget method, the LCCA extends the time range of evaluation to the whole life of the product and focuses on its use, maintenance, and recycling, making the evaluation of the product more comprehensive and reasonable. With the increasing awareness of environmental protection, LCA, a method of evaluating product life cycle impact from the perspective of environmental impact rather than economic cost, has also been further developed. Now the application of LCA has become mature in many fields. In the early twentyfirst century, the international road engineering research began to introduce LCA and developed a series of professional LCA analysis software. ISO 14040 points out Transportation Systems Analysis and Assessment

probabilistic methods to discuss the uncertainty of LCCA. The announcement first discusses the basic principles widely followed by LCCA and then gives the application case of traditional LCCA pavement design. Secondly, the uncertainty of input parameters is discussed, and the acceptable range of time and discount rate is provided. Thirdly, the sensitivity analysis of traditional LCCA method is discussed. Finally, it proposes the specific contents of user cost including delay cost, vehicle operation cost, and accident cost and presents the specific calculation method [2]. Delwar and Papagiannakis evaluated government and user costs of roads under a

Integrated Life Cycle Economic and Environmental Impact Assessment for Transportation…

variety of road and traffic conditions, based on data from the Department of Transport in Washington. The evaluation results show that the user cost may be significantly higher than the government cost, so the user cost cannot be ignored in

accuracy of life cycle costs based on data and case studies from the Michigan Department of Transportation. The results show that LCCA can correctly predict and select the lower cost pavement scheme, but the actual cost is usually lower than the estimated value of LCCA. This result may be due to the inadequate consideration of specific pavement characteristics in cost estimation, so improving the process of pavement construction and maintenance cost estimation can help to

To sum up, after 10 years of development, the analysis method of LCCA is relatively mature at present, but there is still a lack of data needed for evaluation. Since its inception, LCCA has been widely used in the road industry and has become a necessary component of road program evaluation in the United States. So far, the classification and calculation methods of owner cost and user cost of LCCA have been relatively mature, and the corresponding calculation tools have been widely

In the 1970s, the oil crisis caused widespread global interest in energy, and then

Häkkinen and Mäke lä studied the life cycle of pavement in Finland based on the

Horvath and Hendrickson evaluated hot-mixed asphalt concrete pavement and continuously reinforced concrete pavement (CRCP) in the United States. After analysis and comparison, the author came to the conclusion that during the

life cycle assessment theory. Through the analysis and comparison of common concrete pavement and stone matrix asphalt (SMA) pavement, the author thinks that in terms of energy consumption, if feedstock energy (refers to the combustion energy contained in raw materials of road construction, which can no longer be used as energy) is taken into consideration, asphalt pavement consumes twice as much energy as cement concrete pavement. If feedstock energy is not included, the energy consumption of these two pavements is equal. In terms of carbon dioxide emissions, common concrete pavement discharges 40–60% more than asphalt pavement, and the difference varies depending on the specific maintenance

the world began to see a boom in building energy consumption research. The energy consumption survey of buildings first emerged in the United States and the United Kingdom. They mainly inspect the energy consumption of existing buildings, tap their energy saving potential, and carry out energy saving transformation, which is called energy auditing [6]. Initially, researchers abroad concentrated on civil buildings and then gradually extend to all aspects of infrastructure construction. Research on road energy consumption has also appeared relatively early, and a

lot of research achievements have been made and applied in practice.

realize the potential of LCCA pavement scheme selection [4].

used in many states of the United States [5].

2.2 Development of life cycle assessment

scheme [7].

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Chan et al. studied and analyzed the accuracy of LCCA decision-making and the

the life cycle cost analysis [3].

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.86854

that LCA method is composed of four parts: definition of goals and scope, inventory analysis, impact assessment, and result interpretation. It studies and analyzes the stages of raw material acquisition, construction, use, maintenance, and end of life, which is of great significance for promoting the ecological development of road construction. However, existing analysis isolates economic costs and environmental impacts from each other and fails to fully explore the overall impact of the product.

This chapter will summarize the international research development of LCCA and LCA applied on transportation infrastructure and puts forward the idea of evaluating the whole life cycle by combining the two life cycle methods; the calculation models involved in the integrated method will also be introduced, so as to provide reference for the decision of multi-scheme comparison in road engineering and the popularization and application of the life cycle methods.
