GUIDANCE - GUidelines for H-BIM Documentation, mAnagemeNt and Conservation of built heritage assEts

Abstract:

The digitization in the construction sector is an ever-expanding phenomenon, born to deal with the critical issues deriving from the fragmentation typical of the traditional design process. In particular, the move towards digitization derives from the increasing demand and need for transparency in the documentation of existing buildings with the aim of obtaining a complete picture of public assets, in their state of conservation and maintenance, useful for identifying the interventions necessary to keep buildings efficient. 

These issues play a pivotal role in national and international regulations and in financing projects, such as those of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), which promote and support the digitization of real estate assets and their energy and performance efficiency.
These plans are in addition to the national regulations that introduced the mandatory request for the use of Building Information Modelling (BIM) in public procurement, adopting interoperable platforms by means of open standards, and to government funds in favor of renovations, maintenance, and recovery of buildings, in line with the European targets of digitization, containment of land consumption and reuse of existing buildings. 

Therefore, the use of BIM is today a current and inevitable reality, not only for the design of new buildings but especially for the management of the building process and existing assets. Despite the importance of the latter, attested by several studies and the current regulations, there are still some open issues deriving from the complexity of the built heritage, not in line with the standardized logic of BIM, born for the project of new buildings. 

The project fits into this framework and comes not only from the previous studies and research carried out by both units, relating to the experimentation with BIM and HBIM with the aim to propose solutions to the issues deriving from this change of methodology, but from the needs of the Universities as public administrations, carried out by the stakeholders of the technical departments. The proposal, in fact, arises from the needs of public administrations to meet the national and European targets and requirements, and their purpose to pursue the aim of modernizing the documents dematerialization and organization procedures, to have an available and interrogable knowledge upon their properties, useful for a more aware management. 

Therefore, the project aims to develop H-BIM procedures for the creation of customizable parametric models of the architectural heritage with open standards that can be configured as queryable and implementable digital building dossiers, starting from the cognitive and documentary phase, through the definition of protocols and guidelines which will be tested and validated through the development of four different case studies chosen between the assets of the two Universities. 

The proposal falls into the current European and national directives that push towards an increase in the use of new technologies for digitizing public heritage, with the aim of increasing the control of the state of conservation of buildings and the quality of projects. In this context, the project aims to develop, test, and validate guidelines with open standards, reproducible regardless of the software used, for the construction and informatization of HBIM models that can be configured as digital building dossier, which can be interrogated and implemented, and the validation of the same and their informative content.