Carnegie Mellon University

Open Access Books and Software

The Civil and Environmental Engineering department and faculty offer open access to a number of electronic books and online software tools in the fields of project management, life-cycle assessment and civil infrastructure systems.

Life Cycle Assessment

Life Cycle Assessment Textbook

This textbook reflects the authors' combined fifty years’ experience in the pioneering Life Cycle Assessment teaching and research conducted at CMU and is the centerpiece of a comprehensive collection of unique learning resources—all of which are available online for use at no cost.

Full textbook and lecture notes are available. This text, published in 2015, has already been adopted in 25 university courses in North America with translations to Thai and Chinese in progress.

LCA textbook cover art featuring various energy and transportation systems

Project Management and Civil Infrastructure Economics

Project Management for Construction: Fundamental Concepts for Owners, Engineers, Architects and Builders

This book discusses the participants, the processes and the techniques of project management for construction. The book discuses the owner's focus of the cost-effectiveness of facility construction rather than competitive provision of services by the various participants.

  • First Edition originally printed by Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-731266-0, 1989 with co-author Tung Au.
  • Second Edition prepared for world wide web publication in 2000.
  • Version 2.2 prepared Summer, 2008.

Construction of a Benzene Plant in Lima, Ohio (courtesy of Manitowoc Company, Inc.)

CSP Book – Civil Infrastructure Planning, Investment and Pricing

Engineers, planners, and policy analysts, among others, often have little formal training or education in investment planning and pricing. This text delves into investment planning, pricing, benefit-cost analysis, and similar topics and is intended to be a complement to a  companion volume available on the Internet addressing the general topic of Project Management for Construction. 

Originally published in 1984 with a focus exclusively on transportation facilities and services, recent revisions expand the focus to include examples and issues relevant to multiple types of civil infrastructure systems.

image of a workers on a construction site

Engineering Economics for Capital Investment Analysis

This book presents basic concepts and analytic techniques for public and private sector engineering projects.

Cover of the Engineering Economics for Capital Investment Analysis textbook

Fundamentals of Infrastructure Management

Fundamentals of Infrastructure Management, will expand the impact of the material and help improve the practice of infrastructure management. 

This book grew out of a decade of co-teaching a course entitled ‘Infrastructure Management’. Our teaching philosophy was to prepare students for work in the field of infrastructure management. We believe that infrastructure management is a professional endeavor and an attractive professional career. The primary audience for this book is expected to be professionals intending to practice infrastructure management and only secondarily individuals who intend to pursue a career of research in the area.