Building condition assessment visual inspection online system

Abstract

Building condition assessment (BCA) is an assessment that provides the information of deficiencies of the property to support the decision-making and management of its maintenance and rehabilitation. Most of the practice of BCA nowadays is still using the manual inspection, which has many disadvantages and is no longer practical. Therefore, the aim of this study is to create a web system of BCA to be implemented in today’s practice. To achieve this aim, BCA was conducted on three heritage buildings in Johor Bahru, which are Istana Zaharah, Dato’ Abdullah Jaafar building and Keretapi Tanah Melayu (KTM) building to obtain all the required information to be input into the system and to identify the outcomes that should be presented. Heritage buildings were chosen as the case study because they are more likely to have more defects for data maximization. Apart from that, available standards and findings from previous studies were referred as guidelines in developing this new system. The BCA was conducted based on the structural and architectural elements i.e. maintainability, security, functionality and the sustainability of the original construction material. From the case study conducted, each defect on the building was identified and rated according to its condition and maintenance priority. From each defect, by using the matrix calculation, the overall rating, from 1 to 5, of the building was determined. As a result from the building assessment and matrix analysis, it was found that Istana Zaharah is rated 5, requiring further investigation, which may lead to major maintenance and rehabilitation or demolish to reestablish to its original state. Whilst the condition rating of Dato’ Abdullah Jaafar building and KTM building are 3 and 4 respectively, indicating Dato’ Abdullah Jaafar building can be used partially but both building required further detailed investigation to determine the integrity of the buildings. To test the functionality and verification of the developed system, professionals were appointed in this study to conduct BCA in real situation. A set of questions was distributed to obtain their feedback on the system for further improvement before it can be widely used. The feedback from the professionals agreed that the BCA online system reduced the time of on-site inspection work as compared with the manual method that they used previously. Finally, after some improvements made, with the feedback obtained from the professionals, a BCA web system was developed. The outcome of the system is the overall condition rating of a building inspected together with the recorded detailed defects data.