Life Cycle Management Tool for Buildings

Uncertainty in future needs of maintenance, repair and rehabilitation (MR&R) of buildings and new real estate management requirements have led to the need for special life cycle management systems and tools. The programme "MaintenanceMan" was aimed to be a new kind of life cycle management tool which fulfils the requirements of many stakeholders such as owners, contractors, designers and maintainers. The program "MaintenanceMan" can be characterised as predictive, optimising, integrated, life-cycle based and probabilistic. The life cycle management tool "MaintenanceMan" was meant to be a prototype of a later commercial program. The preliminary version of the tool was programmed as a Visual Basic Application on Microsoft Excel. Only the building envelope, i.e. the facades, balconies and roof coverings were included in the system but the system can be extended to cover any parts of buildings. Several optional materials are available. By the help of the program it is possible to plan the future MR&R actions for modules (building parts) and to find the optimal maintenance strategy with regard to financial, functional and ecological aims. The functional condition analysis is probabilistic and based on the Markov Chain method. The design process includes three stages: MR&R action design, project design and annual resources design. The MR&R action design is specific to each module of a building and results in MR&R action profiles with action specifications and timings. In the project design single actions are combined into groups of actions which are planned to be executed in the same project. At the last stage of design the annual project programs are prepared taking into account the annual budget.