Any engineering project is preceded by planning, projecting, and estimating pre-construction, construction, and post-construction costs. Projects are thus constrained by a time, cost, and quality budget. This budget reflects planning and will ultimately explain the life-time cost and quality of maintenance. Planning and flexibility in planning (or lack thereof) typically results in cost and time overruns and severe quality issues. Most projects fail to deliver sustainable project outcomes not only due to cost overruns, but also the costs of maintenance due to poor planning. The literature has thus started to recognise the importance of life-cycle cost management (LCCM) in the construction industry.

It is vital to be aware of the costs relating to the entire lifespan of both planned and existing structures, as this approach facilitates informed decision-making on the part of both public and private investors. Advanced management of life-cycle costs for different and distinctive structures becomes a challenge for researchers and practitioners since relevant datasets are not commonly available. Project stakeholders should be conscious of the latest developments in LCCM in order to optimise engineering solutions regarding the technology and materials used in construction, maintenance, and repairs strategies, as well as the facility’s demolition and possible reuse.

This Special Issue aims to provide an overview of the existing body of knowledge and collect recent research findings in the field of LCCM. We welcome original empirical and theoretical research papers contributing to the development of the area of LCCM, as well as review articles discussing the current state of the art. Papers addressing critical issues of lifecycle costing, examples, predictions, modelling, and optimisation are highly encouraged.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Cost optimisation approaches from the construction life-cycle perspective
• Impact of materials quality and intervention in the life-cycle of construction projects
• Intelligent decision support systems for construction life-cycle cost management
• Novel methods and approaches to tackle the way in which planning affects the maintenance of structures
• Procurement strategies for incentivising the construction life-cycle perspective
• Pitfalls and opts of IoT, CPS, and AI applications in smart construction projects