IF articles

Summary - During a presentation of the FAI autumn days, the President of the foundation, Prof. Andrea CARANDINI, started works with a particularly original introduction to the topic of the conservation of works and historic buildings. In the refined rhetoric with which the professor treated the topic, in his use of effective allegories, with which he described five “virtues of maintenance” as good maintenance rules, we seemed to see an exhortation addressed to a modern generation of technicians who, seizing the opportunities offered by new digital technologies, could respond in an evolved key to that list of virtues and participate in an innovative phase in the management of the maintenance of existing structures. In fact, the topic, of natural interest for railway maintenance organisations, had recently found a particular space in an experimentation which aimed to test the opportunities offered by the digital world, exactly in the field of maintenance, “in situ” and on a considerable scale, in particular those of “Building Information Modeling”. It was a survey applied to the real case of the Napoli Centrale station to understand in detail how the digital world can be a response to those maintenance needs, well expressed in the professor’s introduction. It should be noted that we will only marginally address issues related to BIM design or conservation or restoration. The purpose of this work is in fact to describe our research by trying to highlight the advantages offered by new digital technologies in the field of maintenance, so that others:clients, experts, designers, supervisors, can be driven to experiment with these advantages and therefore work better thanks to amplification tools of the skills of each subject in the exercise of its skills.