Visualization of the Modeled Degradation of Building Flooring Systems in Building Maintenance
Résumé
he development of a maintenance program for construction projects is a highly complex and data-intensive undertaking. This exercise is characterized by the lack of relevant data on the one hand and the overwhelming amount of extraneous data on the other. The uncertainties and complexities have resulted in increased conservatism in the development of life-cycle evaluation of building maintenance programming, subsequently, these programs tend to display the symptoms of either the maintenance actions being uneconomical or fall short of providing the appropriate service to the users of the building. The current research project is based on the premise that the visual approach will facilitate a just-in-time solution to maintenance scheduling, hence, the use of virtual simulation of the building is proposed. The broader aim of this research is to develop a complete building maintenance program through visualization of buildings as they degrade over time. Here, the focus is on the flooring system and the manner they degrade over time. This requires a better understanding of their pattern and rate of usage. To this end, anthroposophy and anthropocentric descriptions of human movement pattern have been used to describe the behavior of “subjects” and subsequently represent the pattern and density of the degradation of flooring systems. The mathematics representing this behavior has been developed which enables it to be embedded into the proposed overall visual building maintenance model.