Sustainability evaluation and maintenance in the building process

Forecasting environmental impacts, energy inputs and emission, associated to maintenance, is essential at the design stage in order to compare and evaluate design alternatives. Many service life planning techniques developed for different aims such as FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) procedures can be successfully associated to specifically environmental analysis such as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). The FMEA is a design tool which allows the use of different sources of information. In the FMEA methodology a project must be individually evaluated due to particular variables such as site, weather and other agents influencing building durability. Timing, execution and maintenance tasks for each component from either internal (architects professional experience) or external sources of information (durability assessment, literature, in field simulation, results of laboratory tests etc.) and environmental impacts can be estimated. Energy and material related operations are even more significant in the maintenance rather than in the construction phase. The association of LCA and failure Mode Analysis allows the designer to optimise the choice of building elements and the detailing in regard to the whole building sustainability. In this perspective the use of LCA techniques and service life planning techniques, as well as FMEA, to investigate the building process has to be considered.