The scope of ISO/TC59/SC14 "Design Life of Buildings" is to produce standards on the steps to be taken at various stages of the building cycle to ensure that the resulting constructed facility, will last for its intended life without incurring large unexpected expenditures of money or resources. The standards for design life of buildings also identify a guiding concept on durability of building products of help in implementing the European Construction Products Directive, CPD. Four parts of the standard series, ISO 15686 Buildings and Constructed Assets - Service Life Planning, have been published. Another 4 parts of the 15686 series are on the way to be approved, one being the Part 8 "Reference service life and service life estimation". Of particular importance is the concept of Reference Service Life (RSL; the expected service life in a well-defined set of in-use conditions), the procedures for service life prediction (Part 2) and the Factor Method (FM) for estimation of service life in specific projects (Part 1 and 8). The FM is used to modify an RSL to obtain an estimated service life (ESL) of the components of a design object, while considering the difference between the projectspecific and the reference in-use conditions. This methodology receives much interest from the international R&D community. A challenge is to establish databases on RSL and factor distributions. This presupposes the involvement of the industry and other stakeholders in the work. RSL is also essential in providing environmental information on whole life cycle of building products. According to ISO/DIS 21930 Buildings and Constructed Assets - Sustainability in Building Construction - Environmental Declarations of Building Products, it is necessary to have RSL data of the product to provide scenarios for environmental impacts of the use stage of the product. The Part 9 "Service life declaration in Product standards" is developed in parallel with work in CEN to establish guidance documents for inclusion of durability declarations in product standards. For innovative products EOTA (European Organisation for Technical Approvals) are issuing European Technical Approvals, where the durability evaluation is performed according to EOTA guidance developed on the basis of the service life prediction concepts as expressed in ISO 15686-2.

With the rapid development of IFC based standards for digital object oriented models of building products there is a huge need for property sets, such as durability and service life data, which can be linked directly to the building elements.