Towards a Heritage Digital Guidelines in Planned Preventive Maintenance (PPM)

The requirements of building sustainability and the use of information technologies have led to the new vision of continuum building design that considers each stage of a building’s life cycle, including the recovery and up-cycling of materials and building components according to the circular economy models. Continuum building design promotes planned preventive maintenance (PPM) and moves away from the current emergency acting on assets compromised by serious pathologies. It allows the optimisation of time and resources and the durability of interventions through sustainable and effective practices. The paper presents the preliminary results of a research activity aimed at identifying and validating guidelines for architectural heritage conservation through the development of an open knowledge platform to dissemination of the best practices currently available. The main goals are promoting preventive and planned maintenance as the main strategy of conservation of the building heritage and overcoming the fragmentation and scarcity of reliable information of scientific and technical literature for diagnostics, interventions and durability monitoring. The guidelines will cover all stages of the conservation process, from the preliminary phase of knowledge of the building. Moreover, type, extent and cause of degradation will be identified, including their resolution or at least their decrease according to the criterion of minimum intervention and maximum effectiveness with the lowest cost and the lowest environmental impact using sustainable and compatible products. The guidelines of the open digital platform will be identified through the study and critical analysis of interventions on monuments belonging to Italian historical heritage. The monuments chosen as case studies have been affected by various forms of degradation, in many cases triggered by the presence of rising damp. This latter one has been stopped using an already verified economical and sustainable device that uses charge neutralization technology CNT-Domodry®. The research provides for the initial activity of identification of digital standardization protocol, information cataloguing and metadata in order to achieve the final comparison of interventions and the consequent identification of best practices. The cataloguing rules of the ICCD and the digital platform for risk assessment of heritage of the ICR have been taken as a reference. Future developments of the research project will consist in the acquisition and critical processing of information on relevant number of case studies in order to have scientific evidence to proceed toward a Heritage Digital Guidelines in PPM.