A Comparison of Digital Procedures to Support Renovation Processes of the Built Environment

The inefficiency affecting a significant part of our built heritage reveals the urgency of renovating existing buildings and the need for extensive and cost-effective interventions. To achieve a disruptive diffusion of renovations good practices, it is still necessary to increase end-users' awareness and provide a framework for efficient workflows to the professionals involved in these processes (designers, contractors, manufacturers). In this scenario, digital technologies play a key role, since they enable the optimisation of the whole renovation process by saving time and costs, reducing the chances of mistakes, and fostering interoperability. One of the main applications of digital technologies in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) sector deals with the organisation of data into digital, informative models that can be useful for the management of many phases of the process, from planning to monitoring. The collection of data on existing buildings is the first crucial step in this workflow and current methodologies for their acquisition and processing still require expensive tools and complex, time-consuming procedures. Despite the growing research interest concerning the trade-off between accuracy and real feasibility of the acquisition and processing phases, an approach that takes into account both the affordability of survey practices and the suitability of acquired data for subsequent modelling steps is still needed. This study contributes to this aim by presenting some tests carried out within the European project ARV with the goal of defining and validating strategies based on digital procedures to support renovation processes. An experimental comparison among three different data acquisition and processing strategies has been conducted. The approach adopted considers, on the one hand, the limits and potential of the acquisition and processing procedures and tools, and, on the other hand, the requirements for digital modelling in BIM environment.