APPLICATION OF THE OF THE DEPRECIATION COST APPROACH IN THE CHOICE OF THE MAINTENANCE STRATEGIES

Often, the choice of the best maintenance strategies for the management of the housing capital takes as a basis situations or contingent choices, with the consequence of making a prevalent use of corrective maintenance, or of overlooking more appropriate estimative approaches. The work proposes the application of the method of the depreciated reconstruction cost (or depreciation cost approach) to the complex problem of the individuation of the most appropriate criteria for the management of the service life of a building component. Usually, in fact, there are various possibilities, which involve consequence that differ between them on an economic, technological and fruitional point of view: • absence of interventions, in order to produce the ‘consumption’ of the performance of the component during its service life; • regular activity of maintenance, which always allows performances to be close to their initial value, with little but constant shares of expense as a consequence; • programmed interventions of maintenance of major entity in presence of significant decreases of the level of performance, in order to lengthen the service life of the component. The choice of the most appropriate strategy is often determined by issues tied to the opportunity of the moment, considering the available budget or the convenience in its immediate execution in opposition to the possibility to differ the moment of the intervention of maintenance. The aim of the present work is to offer a more reliable to individuate, for each component, which one is the most opportune strategy, considering the depreciation it is subjected to during time as a consequence of its performance decay, which is tied – as it is suggested by the methodology of the depreciated reconstruction cost – to physical wear and tear, income decay and functional obsolescence.