HBIM Application in Historic Timber Structures: A Systematic Review

Despite the recent significant increase on the use of Building Information Modelling (BIM) in the cultural heritage field, its application on heritage timber structures aiming at their conservation and assessment has not yet been fully established. Comparing with other construction materials, timber presents singular features that must be addressed in order to carry out a proper condition assessment. For this reason, this review summarizes existing works on historical timber structures using Historical BIM (HBIM), focusing not only on various geometric surveying and 3D modelling methods, but also on nongeometric information included in the model which are especially related with conservation, testing, and monitoring. In addition, this work illustrates the effectiveness increase given by a structural analysis, as to assess structural heath, after being implemented within a HBIM-based framework. To that aim, a global framework is proposed where the development and implementation level of different analysis stages are described.