Construction management of cultural heritage. Conservation of cultural heritage during its construction site stage. Building information modelling supporting on site information collection and management for cost control

Cultural heritage preservation and management is a complex domain, to which numerous and very diverse disciplines contribute specific, crucial competencies. Hence, cultural heritage represents a highly valuable experimental field, in which innovative management models and tools to govern complexity in general can be designed. Despite that, this perspective of cultural heritage management seems more foster at the level of academic instead of workplace. Moreover, this topic is more crucial on the Italian territory due to its history and the abundance of heritage buildings. The whole construction sector is affected by a consequent loss in information and knowledge between the different stages of the life of a building. The trend entails an increase of costs and a waste of time to recover all this information. This issue is more critical and crucial with regards to the built environment, especially when involves conservation projects of a heritage building. Indeed, the knowledge of the building has to be recovered, implemented and continuously update, to be conducted to posterity. Due to its’ multidisciplinary and organizational nature, Information technology (IT) is now used as an instrument in the AECO industry to reduce some of the problems generated by its fragmentation. The most disruptive one is Building Information Modelling (BIM), a tool that allows a digital representation of physical and functional characteristics of a facility (digital twin). However, BIM for heritage assets (historic buildings and sites) is relatively new field and appears less popular in terms of adoption by heritage professionals. The research proposes a BIM-based approach for cultural heritage project in order to manage the construction stage of a conservation project. In particular, the research defines a proper protocol to deal with all information turn up during the construction site for a correct planned conservation. This research focuses on the benefits that new technologies could bring to handle the construction process directly in the field. The scope of the research is to develop a new framework to gather all information from construction site via new technologies. The aim is to improve an accurate supervision of the site activities, to pursue a proper project control of construction stage, especially regarding the cash flow. In particular, this research work would support the Public Administration to improve and implement its actual procedures employing technologies already in use, for the cost management during construction site. The research seeks to strengthen precise protocols related to construction site activities regarding cultural heritage project in order to collect and manage all information required for the drafting of demanded documentation by Italian standard (scientific report for planned conservation) and create a unique knowledge repository of the cultural artefact, useful for the following usage and maintenance phase.