Practical approaches to the application of life-cycle civil engineering for infrastructures in Korea

Though the demand on the LCCE for civil infrastructures is rapidly growing with the broad range of application areas including highway and railroad bridges, highway construction and pavement, dams, and water resource structures, harbor structures, underground structures, geotechnical structures, and sanitary structures, etc., yet the understanding of LCC and the application of LCCA software system by practitioners are not in mature state in civil engineering practice. Mainly because theoretically the LCCE problems, as stated above, become extremely complex simply because time-variant degrading resistance and stochastic nature of extreme load effects incur various damages/failures related with strength serviceability, durability, deterioration throughout the life span of a structure, which in turn, bring forth highly complicated cost and uncertainty assessment that often involves the lack of cost data associated with various direct and indirect losses, and the absence of uncertainty data available for the assessment.