Rethinking Building Maintenance

Dear Colleagues,

The concept of maintenance initially emerged in the industrial and mechanical engineering sector. It is generally acknowledged that maintenance activities in the construction sector over the past decades have been seen as a necessary nuisance. The majority of maintenance actions in the construction sector are still reactive, with the selection of a given maintenance action to minimize costs, regardless of the risks, whilst sacrificing user interests and building performance. Frequently, the adopted maintenance policies have presented numerous limitations, such as that the implementation of strategic procedures is often poor or nonexistent, the information regarding the durability and performance of buildings is neglected, the risk of failure over time is not considered, and the global costs associated with repairs are not adequately addressed. Fortunately, such approaches have increasingly been replaced with improved approaches, and real estate managers currently recognize that appropriate maintenance is the only way to ensure the long-term durability of constructed assets, in the most economical way and without compromising their reliability or safety.

This Special Issue Rethinking Building Maintenance will provide an overview of existing knowledge on new approaches for building maintenance. Original research, theoretical and experimental work, case studies, and comprehensive review papers are invited for possible publication. Relevant topics to this Special Issue include but are not limited to the following subjects:

• New approaches for building maintenance;
• Imperfect maintenance policies;
• Condition-based maintenance strategies;
• Opportunistic maintenance;
• Digital methodologies applied to heritage building maintenance;
• Building maintenance under climate change.

Dr. Ana Silva
Dr. Michael A. Lacasse
Dr. Andrés Prieto
Dr. Carles Serrat Piè
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Buildings is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.