Do we need a buildings’ inspection, diagnosis and service life prediction software?

Abstract

During decades, the maintenance of buildings has been mainly reactive, based on subjective criteria, thus compromising the users’ safety and leading to a built park highly deteriorated. The effective planning of maintenance strategies requires the development of accurate tools to aid stakeholders’ decisions about when and how to intervene. This study analyses the utility of two computational tools to aid the adoption of condition-based maintenance policies, developed for the buildings’ envelope elements. The first tool is as an expert diagnosis and inspection system, which allows understanding how to intervene, based on the pathological characterization of the element analysed. The second tool provides information related with the element’s service life (when to intervene), according to their characteristics. However, before the definition of these tools, a question must be raised: “Do users need a buildings’ inspection, diagnosis and service life prediction software?” Therefore, this study performs a market survey involving 57 varied stakeholders working on the maintenance sector, evaluating the usefulness of the proposed computational tools, identifying the characteristics that the software must have to ensure its use by the sector.