The Sub-Committee on Whole-Life Costing of PIARC Technical Committee 7, Concrete Roads, has prepared this review of the components of a whole-life cost methodology and the major issues associated with its use. Whole-life costs include costs to highway authorities and road users, costs of road accidents, and environmental costs. Whole-life costing includes time-based estimates of the maintenance requirements during the life of a pavement, including those relevant to its most important properties: friction, evenness, gradient, drainage, road noise, reflectivity, rutting, and cracking. Material characteristics are also important. There are many different models for predicting changes in pavement condition during a road's lifetime. Whole-life costing (WLC) is a system for calculating all costs of a road during its lifetime, to compare different design and construction solutions for different parts of a road. Its aspects include: general data input, traffic, predicting surface characteristics, identifying maintenance needs, and costs. Financial considerations, such as interest rates, government funding, and income from road users, are discussed, and probabilistic approaches are mentioned. Examples of WLC models are outlined, from Sweden, the UK, the USA, Chile, Australia and Austria. Some conclusions are presented.
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