Setting an effective User Reporting procedure to assess the building performance

The importance of acquiring information from users to support the phases of the building process (design, construction, management and dismantling) is widely recognized by the scientific and technical community. In addition, in the era of the “Digital Transition” in building construction, participatory-sensing systems leveraging smart devices offer unprecedented observational capacity at the scale of the individual. On the other hand, data acquired by the users are typically characterized by multiple actors, many and often conflicting values and views, a wealth of possible outcomes and high uncertainty. Despite the widespread use of “user data acquisition” techniques, there are no procedures and guidelines to create effective user reported-based data acquisition in the building construction sector. This paper proposes eight steps to set an effective User Reporting and overcome the classical drawbacks of data acquired by users for the inspection of technical and factual features. In particular, steps 1-2 a priori identify clusters of stakeholders and users to improve data homogeneity; steps 3-4 select technological tools, questionnaires and guidelines to inde- pendently acquire data from different clusters of users; steps 5-8 define the information flow, the validation approach and diagnostics. In order to show the potentiality of the proposed approach, the User Re- porting is applied to the building diagnostics of 131 RC buildings located in the Valencian coast (Spain).