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In the context of the existing buildings, in recent years the concept of maintenance has changed from corrective maintenance to preventive maintenance, which is based in part on periodic inspections. There is ample evidence that preventive maintenance is more efficient than corrective maintenance, since severe deteriorations that may represent danger to people are avoided, and also money is saved. To make periodic inspections of the buildings is useful to quantify the extent to which deteriorations are severe or not, in order to facilitate decision making and prioritise therapeutic interventions. To this purpose, many scales have been used and are used to assess the degree of severity of the deteriorations in constructive elements. But it is important to say that there is no common consensus and these scales are different between them according to the study to which they belong. Thus, the main goal of this article is to propose a methodology for calculating the degree of severity of damages in buildings, which is of widespread use. This calculation method, based on one hand in a distribution of values and on the other hand in a single value (scalar), lets to calculate the severity index of systems and of the entire building, and it is easy to use and flexible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To make periodic inspections of the buildings is useful to quantify the extent to which deficiencies are severe or not, in order to facilitate decision making and prioritize interventions. In previous works by the authors is proposed a scale of gravity of damages in buildings, with the aim of being of widespread and of common use among professionals. This scale is applied through the direct assignment (DA) methodology, based on the generic definitions of each degree. It is demonstrated and characterized the existence of certain level of variability among technicians, when assigning gravity values using DA methodology, due to the fuzzy condition of the attribute to be evaluated. The main goal of this paper is to propose a methodology to assign values of gravity, based on hazard for people of detachments from the façade, by using measurable parameters and mathematical functions. The final objective is to reduce the level of variability among inspectors when assessing the condition state of a building façade. The proposed methodology is named system of evaluation of façades (SEF). The methodology can be also extended to the assessment of other building systems as structures or roofs and other type of infrastructures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of the built environment in the recent years, the concept of maintenance has changed from corrective to preventive maintenance. There is evidence that preventive maintenance is much more efficient than corrective maintenance, since severe deteriorations that may represent danger to people are avoided, and also money is saved. To make periodic inspections of the buildings is useful to quantify, the extent to which deteriorations are severe or not, in order to facilitate decision making and prioritise interventions. To this purpose, many scales have been used and are used to assess the severity of damage and degradation of the building components. But it appears evident that there is not consensus among users and these scales are different between them, with different number of degrees and metrics for the measurement of the condition state. The main goal of this paper is to calculate which is the optimal metric (which is the optimal number of degrees) of a severity scale of damages in buildings, so the corresponding scale could be of widespread and of common use among professionals, avoiding the problems of comparison between different evaluators. The proposed methodology to calculate the optimal metric of a scale can be also extended to other scopes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]