Simulation of maintenance costs in UK local authority sport centres

The costs of building maintenance, particularly in high-demand public sector facilities, can account for a significant proportion of the whole life cycle costs. The ability to accurately predict these maintenance costs can provide an essential management tool during the operational stages. A thorough investigation of existing techniques and metrics to predict these costs provides the basis of this research, which proposes an innovative simulation-based approach to maintenance costs modelling in UK local authority sports buildings. The results obtained show that gross floor area, swimming pool size, and the number of users are the critical factors influencing maintenance costs in sport centre buildings. Probabilistic representations of these variables are used in a stochastic cost-forecasting model, which reveals that the Weibull distribution is suitable for representing the maintenance cost function. The results are validated through the application of the Kolmogrov-Smirnov test, the importance of this test, and the data pre-analysis used in the construction and validation of the input probability distributions, are also discussed. © 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd.