Requirements compliance checking for existing buildings

Most of the building stock in Europe has been built in the sixties and nowadays it is not always fulfilling current requirements coming from binding laws, voluntary standards and clients’ needs. When dealing with assets acquisition or with decisions on their reuse and refurbishment, it always takes a big effort just to understand if a building complies with current regulations, because of the lack of knowledge and laws complexity and jeopardising. This paper shows a tool able to help users dealing with the requirements compliance checking of existing buildings. The purpose of this tool is to enable decision makers in making strategic choices about their assets, by providing them the actual state of the building regarding the requirements compliance. The tool consists in a set of checklists, tailored for building function and declined in all the possible type of spaces of the building; this because each space has specific requirements to fulfil, as well as the building itself (intended as an entity). The tool uses as an input spaces dimensions, performances, characteristics but also documents and permissions; with a calculation procedure, it gives to the user a set of data. This kind of check is fundamental to take decisions about how to conduct the asset: refurbishment, handover, retrofit or simply maintenance are all options that can be evaluated only with the correct knowledge of the asset. A preliminary case study is presented here just to show the potential of this tool; to improve the compliance checking process, some characteristics (that can be automatically checked) have been implemented in Solibri Model Checker. The remaining have been checked manually with other software and all the results have been collected in the checklist developed. This tool is part of a bigger work that wants to look not only at the requirements but also at the physical state of the building (so to organise maintenance), the energetic behaviour (so to optimise consumptions) and at the adaptability potential (so to evaluate functional change alternatives).