On the quality of buildings and construction projects: metrics and process dynamics

For any building project, the project management triangle QCT (Quality, Cost, Time) are decisive in the decision-making process. Indeed, better, faster and cheaper remain very important goals in the design of new industrial products in a competitive environment. In this paper, we propose a reference framework to formalize the quality criterion that characterizes a building made during a project. A quality measurement is then defined based on the performance levels of the functions actually provided by a building and the requirements originally formulated by its owner. In addition, a modeling of the building production process is proposed to observe the effects of technical or managerial choices on the expected quality of a new or renovated building. Finally, a representation of the level of performance of each building technical attribute over its life cycle is proposed in order to represent the performance recovery allowed by a renovation operation as a resilience process. In the end of this paper, a section is dedicated to a computational experiment for illustrating the theoretical approach.