The purpose of the previous chapters was to provide tools that can be used to predict the future performance of engineering systems. This is important since the economic and functional feasibility of large engineering projects depends mostly on their operation and management through time. In this chapter, we discuss the concept of life-cycle analysis, a modern project evaluation paradigm for assessing the impacts (e.g., environmental, economic) of a product (e.g., engineering project) or service from "cradle to grave." Cradle to grave Up to Chap. 8 we focused on existing mathematical models to describe system degradation and the alternatives to derive lifetime distributions. In this and the following chapters, we will use these models within the context of life-cycle analysis. In the first part of the chapter, we discuss in some detail the problem of life-cycle analysis and describe all aspects involved in the evaluation. In the second part, we focus on the problem of defining optimum design parameters for systems with long lifetimes. Some of the concepts developed in this chapter will be used also in Chap. 10 to define maintenance strategies.