Buildings renovation and maintenance in the public sector

This paper presents a model for maintenance and renovation of public sector buildings. The model creates the basis for the Buildpass application, which allows users to apply these methods through a web interface. The author researched innovative approaches in detail, in order to deal with the problems of maintenance and construction refurbishments indicated by companies dealing with software applications used for Facility Management. Maintenance and renovation represent a significant cost within the whole lifecycle of a built asset. Rational owners and facility managers try to minimize the outlays on maintenance and renovation. However, it is necessary to set a baseline condition above which the condition of buildings should be maintained, taking into account the type of usage and demands imposed on the building. The model must be applicable at a level that the user, who is not a civil engineering specialist, would be able to understand it without getting biased or misguided results. On the other hand, the aim is to create an environment where the civil engineering expert can intervene in the primary inputs of the model and thus use his/her own experience and knowledge. Attributes of the IT solution do exist the potential to work on various levels of the model's detail and the time exigency for obtaining information and tasks being solved. It is sometimes necessary to get data within a short timeframe, or alternative solutions to be analyzed, so it is key to focus only on the optimal solution identified, without wasting time exploring poor variants. The application must return a result within a short time, and at the same time not seriously bias the outputs. For a more in-depth analysis, the user then selects how much time they want to dedicate to the task. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).