HBIM METHODOLOGY FOR STRUCTURAL PRESERVATION OF HISTORICAL BUILDINGS: THE SEMANTIC MODELING OF THE SAN FELICE SUL PANARO FORTRESS

Building Information Modelling is changing the design and construction field ever since it entered the market. It took just some time to show its capabilities, it takes some time to be mastered before it could be used expressing all its best features.

Since it was conceived to be adopted from the earliest stage of design to get the maximum from the decisional process, it still struggles to adapt to existing buildings. In fact, there is a branch of this methodology that is dedicated to what has been already made that is called Historic BIM or HBIM.

This study aims to make clear what are BIM and HBIM, both from a theoretical point of view and in practice, applying from scratch the state of the art to a case study. It had been chosen the fortress of San Felice sul Panaro, a marvellous building with a thousand years of history within its bricks, that suffered violent earthquakes (the last one was the destructive earthquake of 2012 in Emilia-Romagna region), but it is still standing.

By means of this example, it will be shown which are the limits that could be encountered when applying BIM methodology to existing heritage. Will be pointed out which are the many features that a simple 2D design software is missing, like semantic modelling or interoperability capabilities.