ABSTRACT
Driven by the development of energy saving and environmental sustainability policies, the use of timber as a building material has found wide development during the last decades. An integral part of the design of timber buildings is the evaluation of durability, which strongly affects the material performances and therefore the building service life. In the design process the service life of the building components can be estimated through different methodologies. A deterministic approach is based on the Factor Method (ISO 15686). In this regards, the present paper briefly introduce an innovative application of the Factor Method for the prediction of the service life of timber structures. The proposal is based on the use of the Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) methods as support tool for the determination of the correction factors. The method is applied and validated on a sample of four case studies.
