ABSTRACT
The maintenance planning and organization during the whole life cycle of a building is the way to optimize the technical-economical maintenance management of buildings, but, because of several reasons this goal is, nowadays, far from being reached. One of the difficulties is recognizable in the hardly knowable information concerning some time-related parameters. This paper illustrates how building pathology sciences, (studying the mechanisms of decay of building materials, components and systems), could allow the development of tools and knowledge that can be very useful to plan the maintenance process, and, closely, these tools make easier, profitable and more correctly usable two maintenance strategies: the emergency maintenance and the preventive maintenance. Maintenance planners need to be able to find out with a high certainty degree the failure causes in order to perform a correct maintenance intervention; this aim requires efficient methodologies and tools to investigate the decay process. Furthermore the detailed knowledge of the alteration mechanisms gives the possibility to obtain information about the steps taken by the components in their decay process, in order to recognize the different signals of an incipient failure. This recognition gives the possibility to act before the happened failure.
