Economics of Infrastructure

Basics of transport economics and Cost/benefit analysis of infrastructure investments. Monetized impacts and assessment of effects. Estimation of costs under uncertainty. The relationship between construction, maintenance and operation costs. Optimization and Life cycle costs, LCC. Value Engineering.

Knowledge: students will gain knowledge of

• Central concepts in Benefit/Cost Analysis (BCA) and economic analysis and application in the transport sector.
• Methodology for cost estimation under uncertainty, method, process and application
• Monetized consequences and impact calculations / output
• The calculation methodology for Life Cycle Cost Analysis (LCCA)
• Value engineering (VE), method, process and utility.

Skills: students will gain skills to

• Constructing demand-supply graphs and do interpretations of these
• Setting up the demand function for a market and understand this
• Make simple Benefit Cost Analysis (BCA) and know how this can be applied
• Calculating cost estimates under uncertainty; expected cost, variance and standard deviation
• Interpreting probability curves for cost estimates and uncertainty profiles in relation to the acceptance criteria
• Determine the primary and secondary functions for projects and elements (part of Value Engineering, VE)
• Construct FAST-diagram (Function Analyse System Technique) (Why-why / how-how-to chart) (part of VE)
• Making matrix analysis for ranking of ideas/alternatives (part of VE).

General competence: students will

• Understand the basic concepts and theory in economics
• Understand the various steps in a stepwise process for estimating project costs under uncertainty
• Understand the various steps in a Value Engineering analysis, and understand how to use a VE process as a QA-tool for a project.

Lectures, excursions and exercises. All exercises must be approved in order to attend the exam.

The course will be given in English if students not speaking Norwegian are attending.