Dynamic System for Prioritizing and Accelerating Inspections to Support Capital Renewal of Buildings

Abstract

© 2014 American Society of Civil Engineers. Maintaining the serviceability of a large number of buildings is a huge challenge that requires a perpetual cycle of inspections and capital renewal actions. Inspection, however, is subjective, costly, and time-consuming. To substantially reduce inspection effort, this research proposes a dynamic inspection-priority system (DIPS) that analyzes recent records of reactive-maintenance data, which is often not utilized for capital renewal, to establish a condition prediction mechanism for most building components without inspection. DIPS also incorporates procedures to prioritize and schedule key inspection tasks in addition to a tablet application designed to allow all-on-site visual inspection by marking on two-dimensional (2D) digital plans. A prototype system of DIPS has been developed and tested using the data of 88 schools in Canada and proved its usefulness as an efficient approach to improve the internal inspection practices of organizations that own a large number of buildings. This research contributes to integrating the maintenance and capital renewal functions, introducing a simple visual approach to inspection, saving inspection time and cost, and ultimately improving the economics of the multibillion-dollar business of capital renewal.