Cultural heritage management: Optimising procedures and maintenance costs

The management of maintenance activities is an ongoing concern for facility managers in the existing building sector due to its complexity and uncertainty. This applies all the more to cultural heritage as protection, preservation and enhancement are a priority in order to keep the artistic and cultural value of historical assets for future generations. In addition, problems related to the increasingly limited economic resources complicate maintenance management processes. Therefore, it has become a common standard to carry them out only when actual emergencies occur, thus causing inefficiencies in the planning of Facility Management and an increase in maintenance costs. This paper shows a method to support the management decision-making in maintenance activities through Building Condition Assessment (BCA) processes integrated with Building Information Modeling (BIM) systems. The main objective is to develop a maintenance management strategy and support technicians in identifying priorities in a practical, simple  and automated way in order to optimise procedures and costs. To achieve such a goal, the method proposes a BCA process that uses the following tools: 1) building breakdown structure according to UNI 8290 adapted to historic buildings; 2) a degradation level index and a technological and operational connection matrix to assess opportunity maintenance; 3) field inspections and data collection on Excel spreadsheets acting as external Database; 4) data management in BIM environment using Revit as BIM Authoring Software and Dynamo scripts as visual programming language (VPL) to link external Database to BIM model. The results highlight the important role of BIM in Facility Management of existing buildings and buildings of historical and cultural value by allowing the continuous update of information in a single model for BCA purposes and shows a great potential to support facility managers in managing building maintenance activities and optimising costs.