Interest in sustainable construction has been increasing due to recent events. The limitations of natural resources and the scale of global impacts, specifically as a result of the effects of global climate change, have consequences for the construction sector. These changes are giving rise to a need to reassess the way we face the built environment and rethink new solutions for construction systems or methods that contribute to mitigating negative consequences, among which we highlight the prefabrication method. This new scenario, characterised by the need to meet the decarbonisation goals set for 2050, as well as the effects of the spread of the pandemic crisis, emphasizes the importance of understanding the impacts that may occur in the construction industry, which are essentially understood as increases in sustainability, productivity, quality and, consequently, as reductions in deadlines, costs, and dependence on labour. Therefore, this entry seeks to study on the existing literature on prefabrication, seeking to gather relevant information on the new advances, challenges, and opportunities of this construction method whose approach has been mostly focused on partial or specific aspects for case studies, both highlighting the potential and identifying the gaps and opportunities of prefabrication in this new context. The prefabrication method brings benefits compared to the conventional method, and may be an alternative, as it has more positive global impacts on the environment, the economy, and society, and consequently on the sustainable development of construction, despite some limitations that have been reported and that should be looked into in the future.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a post-occupancy evaluation (POE) method focused on building maintenance and then to test it on two different sets of residential buildings. The paper’s three main goals are: to obtain useful data for optimizing the buildings’ maintenance plans; to search for any correlation between the occupants’ characteristics and their expectations toward the building; to study the occupants’ willingness to pay for maintenance procedures, as well as its correlation with the occupants’ perception of the elements source of maintenance (ESM). The proposed POE method for building maintenance performance evaluation (BMPE) consists of six main stages, focusing on the occupants’ opinions and their correlation with the facility manager’s. The observed case studies allowed for a preliminary validation of the POE method for BMPE. Results generically endorsed the method as a valuable tool for the rapprochement between facility management and the building’s end-users. Such findings could allow facility managers to develop more efficient maintenance plans focusing on the occupants’ real needs and expectations, raising occupant satisfaction levels and contributing to the building’s general performance.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to review the status of knowledge on the subject of building maintenance from an integrated perspective that incorporates the building lifecycle, that is, from the design stage to the end of life. This work considered the main aspects to be taken into account in determining and implementing maintenance strategies, which requires a cross-sectional view of the entire construction process. At the same time, this approach contributes to the organisation of building management. Design/methodology/approach: Bibliometric review has been carried out to identify relevant subjects and topics about scientific production on building maintenance by analysing the contents of about 745 publications, over the last 15 years, between 2000 and 2016 (first quarter). The survey results were gradually organised into a database grouped into seven main themes which were found to be more discussed and others six emergent themes with topics on building maintenance research. Findings: This research enabled a synthesis of the focal points in the literature on building maintenance, as well as debates among researchers and institutions in the field. The result is a view to the future regarding what issues merit further research and what content requires greater depth of understanding, allowing us to envision research directions that encompass topics and sub-topics for future development. To this end, this bibliometric study draws on knowledge developed over the last 15 years, using research studies published in refereed journals indexed in ISI/SCOPUS as its data source. Originality/value: The novelty of this topic, and the aspect in which it differs from existing studies, is that the researchers analysed a single sub-topic: that is, content regarding maintenance. Thus, this bibliometric literature review allows us to achieve a comprehensive and integrated view of key issues developed in the field of building maintenance. The results show which topics have been more thoroughly developed and which still exhibit gaps and weaknesses. This review allows us to envision well thought out guidelines for future development that have the potential to be relevant to progress in building maintenance research. It also contributes to our understanding of the state of the art in this field of knowledge.

This paper is the result of the research conducted at the University of Porto and follows up on the Ph.D. thesis developed by the second author, which deals with the issue of the non-inclusion of maintenance at the time of architectural design, and of support instruments for the project author to help him in this endeavor. This work is intended to apply a guiding methodology to the design process that includes building maintenance benchmarked by the service behavior with regard to pitched roofs. The development of a decision support model enabled to obtain a maintainability index (MI) to be identified and results from the combination of two indicators: the importance indicator (Iid) and the easiness indicator (Eid). The results achieved enable the project author to have a support tool for making decisions that affect the building behavior in service as well the act of the preservation of heritage value.

Recently, there has been an attempt to implement increasingly significant prefabrication in building construction, since this method is considered to represent an opportunity to reduce impacts in the construction sector. For pitched roofs, there have been relevant developments, such as sandwich panels, asphalt shingles, lightweight roof panels, among others. However, in relation to flat roofs, the advances have been of little relevance and are mainly limited to the improvement of technical characteristics and prefabrication of the construction materials used. The main goal of this article is to demonstrate the possibility of developing new solutions for more sustainable flat roofs in the carbon footprint, and for this purpose a system was developed called ADAPTIVE—Advanced Production System for Sustainable and Productive Roofing Retrofit, which consists of developing a composite solution for the rehabilitation of flat roofs, completely prefabricated and with zero waste, with the aim of increasing energy behaviour, collecting and storing rainwater, and using the roof as a garden leisure space. To obtain the validation results, computerised theoretical modelling was conducted with theoretical assessment of the components and the set of components developed, which allowed us to conclude that the system meets the high hygrothermal, acoustic, and structural requirements.

In short, the quality of construction allows several problems to be identified regarding buildings’ operating behavior, with the important problems ascribed to errors in project design. Often, during architectural design, the architect is deprived of a set of references which enable analysis of all concerns with regard to the proper operating behavior of proposed solutions. To overcome this problem, this paper seeks to contribute a clarification of the main problems concerning the maintenance of buildings and their implications in drafting the project. Architectural design affects a building’s operating behavior, as aspects can be identified to favorably bring about such behavior, as concerns the element of the constructive system’s external wall openings.