Management of maintenance costs in cultural heritage

The present paper was prompted by the activity carried out within the scope of an EU-funded project (WARMEST) that calls for the analysis of monuments’ degradation due to climate change and growing number of tourists. Taking into account the economic aspects, including the increasingly limited resources, related to the conservation of cultural heritage, our research aims to contribute also to the WARMEST project by developing an optimization model for the management and maintenance costs of cultural heritage. This paper focuses on the Brunelleschi’s Cloister within the church complex of Santa Croce (Florence, Italy) and refers to the preliminary study for the achievement of this objective: an analysis of the intrinsic characteristics of the Pietra Serena, its state of degradation and the causes that generate it. The next step will be the analysis of the maintenance costs necessary to stop the degradation process. The information collected will be used to create an HBIM (Heritage Building Information Modeling) model. Meanwhile we will work on predicting the degradation progression due to the climate change through the analysis of the images collected along a period of time and implementing machine learning processes.