Sustainable historical building maintenance using Heritage Building Information Modelling (HBIM)

Many historical buildings stay in poor conditions with indications of critical building defects because the issue of maintenance management is not sufficiently resolved. To date, the Malaysian government has spent quite a large amount of money on conserving historical buildings. However only a few years after major conservation efforts, the buildings continue to deteriorate. Heritage Building Information Modelling (HBIM) approach has been developed as 3D information models to manage and maintain historical buildings in order to help overcome these problems. By integrating the technology of HBIM models with related conservation works documentation, heritage professionals and owners can manage maintenance more efficiently. This paper outlines the current HBIM approaches adopted by heritage professionals and owners of historic buildings in managing buildings after conservation process. Also, this paper is part of ongoing research aimed at developing an HBIM framework for maintenance management of historic buildings in Malaysia. To achieve the aforementioned objective, the paper combined literature review and case studies. The proposed HBIM conceptual framework is significant to sustain buildings and their associated values and will help the Government of Malaysia and the heritage organisations to prepare guidelines for heritage professionals and owners of historic buildings to manage the maintenance of their buildings. Towards these purposes, a structure of piloting the conservation of historic buildings in the coming years can be developed and examined. Furthermore, this study will discuss the benefits, limitations and findings of sustainability for historic building maintenance using HBIM as well as recommendations for future research.