Decision-making for historic building diagnosis by logical inference in HBIM approach: the case of onsite inspection of timber elements

The paper is going to outline a methodological framework for the visual strength grading of timber structural elements, based on the Historic Building Information Modelling (HBIM) approach for data collection and management. Particularly, the development of rule-based inference routines by Visual Programming Language (VPL) is proposed in order to support the automated elaboration of relevant information toward reliable assessment of residual performances. The presentation of an illustrative case study, a small theatre in South Italy, gives the opportunity to show some representative aspects – parametric modelling of building components, integration of external databases, application of the inference algorithm and elaboration of diagnostic reports – of the proposed methods and techniques, which are meant to pave the way for further applications in diagnosis of building pathologies by automated decision-making tools