Public and private clients are beginning to set complex optimization requirements, taking into consideration environmental and cost-efficiency parameters over the built construction's lifetime. The early design process is currently irreversible, and this makes it difficult to change a concrete structure in the later detailed design stage, when more accurate information is available regarding environmental impact and life-cycle costs. There is a dilemma in complying with existing standards to achieve technical requirements while optimizing a concrete structure in order to reduce the climate impact. The long-term goal of the project is to develop a new theoretical concept for dynamic optimization strategies which can be applicable to the early design, the client-requirement preparation, the detailed design, the production and the follow-up stages. This paper presents the results of the up-start phase of the project. The work has focused on the identification of current practice regarding clients' requirements for technical, environmental and cost-efficiency parameters. An analysis of these requirements with sprayed concrete (shotcrete) in a number of ongoing projects has led to the identification of optimization parameter sets. The project has also shown how the physical values of those parameters can be collected from existing statistics, experience recovery databases and previous project requirements, or calculated according to standardized methods and tools. The concept developed will be used in a demonstrative modeling in the next project step.