Visualisation of the degradation of building flooring systems

The development of a maintenance programme for construction projects is a highly complex and data intensive undertaking. This exercise is characterised by the lack of relevant data on the one hand and the overwhelming amount of irrelevant data on the other. This is partly due to the existence of numerous events which act upon the building and that all buildings contain many components, each with several varieties. The complexity of the process is exacerbated by the fact that the interaction between the events and building components extends over the lifetime of the project. The uncertainties and complexities have resulted in increased conservatism in the development of life cycle evaluation of building performance and maintenance programme development. Subsequently, almost all maintenance programmes tend to display the symptoms of one or both of the following pitfalls: maintenance actions are too early, thus uneconomical; and maintenance actions are too late, thus compromising the quality of service. The current research project is based on the premise that the visual approach to maintenance programme development offers a viable solution to the above pitfalls. However, the retrospective nature of the problem suggests that the only practical visual approach is one which relies on the use of virtual simulation of the building. Therefore the aim of the broader research is to develop a 4D visual model of building degradation through time. The focus is on building flooring systems