In the last decades, considerable work has been done regarding service life prediction of buildings and building components. Academics and members of the CIB W080 commission, as well as of ISO TC 59/SC14, have made several efforts in this area and created a general terminology for the concept of service life, which is extremely relevant for property management, life cycle assessment (LCA) and life cycle costs (LCC) analyses. Various definitions can be found in the literature that share common ideas. In fact, there are different criteria that trigger the end of a building’s service life, but the trap that building practitioners too often fall into and that should be avoided is dividing a problem into separate boxes, labels, and specializations without the mutual cohesion and interaction, and ignoring human behavior. Some definitions of service life are discussed in this review paper, in which the cause-effect processes underlying aging and decay are described. These descriptions highlight the continuous interrelation between different criteria for the end of a building’s service life, considering too often neglected and misunderstood causes of the end of life.

In the current world economic situation, the maintenance of built heritage has been limited due to a lack of funds and accurate tools for proper management and implementation of these actions. However, in specific local areas, the maintenance and conservation of historical and cultural heritage have become an investment opportunity. In this sense, in this study, a new tool is proposed, for the estimation of the functional service life of heritage buildings in a local region (city of Seville, South Spain). This tool is developed in Art-Risk research project and consists of a free software to evaluate decisions in regional policies, planning and management of tangible and intangible cultural heritage, considering physical, environmental, economic and social resources. This tool provides a ranking of priority of intervention among case studies belonging to a particular urban context. This information is particularly relevant for the stakeholders responsible for the management of maintenance plans in built heritage.

This article discusses the usability of the Art-Risk 3.0 software for research on the conservation of heritage buildings. It is a new and free software based on fuzzy logic, which enables the assessment of preventive conservation and surveillance of the restoration of heritage buildings over a period of time. This artificial intelligence-based tool considers the vulnerability of buildings, their environments, and their management to evaluate the necessity of their restoration or preventive conservation. To validate the Art-Risk 3.0, 500 theoretical case studies were analyzed, and a 14^th-century Mudejar-Gothic-style Church in Seville, Spain was studied both before and after its restoration to identify post-restoration changes. This proof of concept demonstrates the capability of the Art-Risk 3.0 software to analyze environmental impacts on the vulnerability, risk, and functional service life of buildings, and assess the effectiveness of restoration activities. Additionally, this software identifies the most problematic factors and the necessity of restoration.

The development of objective methodologies for the preventive conservation of historic buildings is extremely relevant to mitigate the deterioration of buildings and sites with exceptional cultural value. In this sense, there is a growing need to develop comprehensive, coherent plans to manage, preserve and protect heritage buildings in areas that are extremely susceptible to natural disasters, such as the case of the Pacific coast of South America. Two methodologies are presented in this study to assess the functional service life and protection level of cultural heritage in Chile. This research intends to establish a correlation between the functional performance of heritage buildings and the Chilean code related to the definition of the preservation of historic heritage buildings. This study applies both methodologies to 25 heritage buildings (timber housing) located in the city of Valdivia, Chile. A multiple linear regression analysis is applied in order to rank the influence of the variables used to define the protection level, according to the Chilean standard, in the functionality index of timber heritage constructions. The information obtained in this study is exceptionally relevant for the researchers and stakeholders responsible for the definition and implementation of maintenance programmes in building stocks.

The maintenance of heritage buildings can be extremely complex; usually, practitioners face many difficult decisions regarding when and how to intervene. The data recovered over time of the conservation and rehabilitation of heritage buildings could represent a new input to aid stakeholders’ decision-making concerning an efficient planning of the maintenance activities to carried out during the buildings’ service life. This study evaluated the impact of maintenance activities in the functionality of heritage buildings through the analysis of historical records concerning the maintenance activities performed on a set of heritage buildings from the 13th and 14th centuries through the 21st century. A sample of 390 historical records were analyzed, recovered from a set of 20 parish churches in the province of Seville in southern Spain. This study assessed the variations observed in the functional service life (buildings’ performance) of the heritage buildings under analysis according to the different interventions and maintenance actions performed over time. The knowledge of the past behavior of the constructions over time and the impact of the different maintenance activities performed allowed finding some patterns in the data. The results obtained in this study, and the lessons learned from past actions, allow promoting the increase of the stakeholders’ knowledge concerning the impact of maintenance activities in heritage buildings, thus aiding the adoption of more technically informed and sustainable maintenance actions in the future.

In this research, a methodology for the service life prediction of external timber claddings is proposed and discussed. The proposed model is based on the visual assessment of 110 timber claddings, subjected to real exposure conditions. The claddings under analysis belong to 80 buildings, with and without heritage characteristics, located in Valdivia and Niebla, South Chile. Timber claddings are a relevant symbol of the local identity of this region, portraying a complexity of ideas and cultural values, inherited by Spanish and German colonizations. The main anomalies that can occur in these claddings are translated into a numerical index, which describes the overall degradation condition of a timber façade. This work also discusses the influence of the local climate and environmental exposure conditions, considering biotic factors (fungi, insects, moulds, algae and bacteria) and abiotic factors (water, solar radiation, amplitude of temperature, physical damage) in the evolution of the degradation condition of timber claddings. The scarcity of funds in Chile to maintain and preserve the constructions and its components needs a more rational approach to decision-making concerning inspection, maintenance and rehabilitation procedures. The expeditious tool proposed in this paper may help in providing the basis for rational decision-making by professionals in practice.