Event and effect model of building maintenance

People tend to spend about 90% of their time in a form of building for which they require comfort and safety. To this end, building maintenance and repair play an important role. Also, from economical perspectives, the overall contribution of operation and maintenance activities constitute a considerable portion of the overall lifecycle cost of the building. The significance of building maintenance planning has been recognized by all stakeholders within the industry and those peripheral to it, as well as the society, from sustainable environment perspective. There have been a number of attempts to provide maintenance and cost evaluation for the whole lifecycle of projects. However, despite the necessity and the attentions, the current systems of whole lifecycle evaluation and maintenance planning are far from satisfactory. This is to the extent that they are hardly practiced, and the limited scattered activities are reactions to regulatory pushes. These shortcomings are partly due to the uncertainties of the future events and partly because of the complexity associated with the scale of the problem. The development of a realistic maintenance programme involves evaluation of numerous instances and scenarios arising from the interaction of diversity of events and a variety of building components. In this paper, a model is presented which systemizes the relationship between the events that give rise to a maintenance instances and the effects that they have on building components or their parts. To this end, an event-effect model is proposed which is based on the combination of relational behaviour of events and building components, and the implementation of their interaction through the use of an object oriented model. The work here will be instrumental in developing the infrastructure underpinning a broader research programme into an integrated building design and maintenance lifecycle evaluation system.