State-of-the-Art Review of Building Inspection Systems

The scientific community is devoting more attention to the wide field of inspection, diagnosis, maintenance, and rehabilitation of buildings, including systems to support the inspection of buildings with anomalies. Since the activities of rehabilitation and maintenance are key factors in buildings' sustainability, it is essential to develop a correct interpretation of defects, supported by objective and adequate diagnosis means, with the goal of significantly increasing the quality standards of potential intervened buildings and their subsequent service life. In this paper, a brief revision of the scope of building inspection systems/methods is made, presenting some of the challenges in this expertise field. From the analysis of the inspection systems/methods found in the literature, it can be concluded that they all have a similar organization but none are entirely devoted to provide expeditious and objective information on on-site interventions. The importance of establishing a reliable Building Inspection System is demonstrated as well, in order to provide easy access to the most relevant information available on building pathology. (C) 2016 American Society of Civil Engineers.