Planning and management of maintenance for school asset sustainability

Designing and managing a system reliability, in addition to guaranteeing adequate safety levels for who build and use such system, consists of planning and operating an articulate set of actions in order to identify, preserve and extend the asset life - from a technic, economic and ecologic point of view. The design, construction and management of system reliability can represent a real strategy to govern complexities aiming at the surviving not only of urban and building systems, but also of environment; indeed the products of building sector are traditionally distinguished from others because of the essential specificity of their life cycle: in otherwords, the life cycle duration. It must first be made clear the system duration issue: what we are trying to carry out is not an “embalming” of existing manufactured, but a permanent quality. However, urban and/ or building quality can’t be expressed in absolute terms, but it is a function of the expected use as well as of the stress levels by which any component will be affected during its useful life cycle. It is thus a dimention to be carefully predicted and projected during the phases of planning, choice of technological solutions and optimisation of value relationships between performances and costs. The concept of quality is then evolving into a predictive-preventive (in other words, projectual) character. It is necessary to underline that functions change so rapidly that the real requirement is to design a system that will inhibit change of function least, and not one that will fit specific function best. Flexibility, as an architectural principle applied to the design buildings, would be the inbuilt capacity to adapt itself to “new, different or changing requirements.” A place should be adapted over time to changing uses and needs, while retaining their attractive human design and scale to foster a nurturing environment for students and teachers alike. A flexible design will support users’s freedom to choose and create the setting that best meets their needs. The requirement-objective of safety, being a determination of the “minimal” level of quality expected by the system, assumes the cybernetic value of “driving requirement” for the surviving of the system itself, helping to define the maintenance strategy. The maintenance strategy corresponds to summing up those decisions able to determine the system surviving in safety conditions, and consists of: how much maintenance, reliability and safety have to be incorporated during the project phase, and which maintenance policies to adopt during the managing phase. The definition of maintenance as activity aiming at implementing the requirements of the availability requirements and safety, makes us reflect on the integration modes of two functions fundamental for the system quality surviving: the two requirements integration is carried out thanks to the processual nature of the maintenance process, being them system characteristics systems to be accurately planned and, at the same time, necessarily guaranteed over time. Two interdependent phases are thus formed: the project phase and the following management phase, configuring reliability not as a static size but as an evolutionary dynamic process. A research about the school infrastructure asset is developing within the academic relationship between Pescara Faculty of Architecture and Porto Faculty of Architecture, undertaken to define tools and methods useful to the optimisation of maintenance.