Innovative Strategies for the Management of the Historical Defence Heritage: The Italian Project IMASS-CHAIN

Elisa Pilia

;Donatella Rita Fiorino

2025-01-01

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Abstract

Nowadays, historical defence heritage is a complex and dynamic built reality, characterised by a significant cultural value, a wide typological heterogeneity, as well as a high degree of technical specialization, high security standards, with both a centralized and distributed management. Thus, this heritage requires a challenging administration in consideration of its complexity and significance. This especially concerns: the interventions of maintenance and restoration, but also the activities required for the adaptation to new military strategies; the need to contain public and operating expenses, and the reduction of environmental impact of the buildings required by the Agenda ONU 2030; the necessity to organise the heritage information system in a certifiable, transparent, and correlated system. Furthermore, the fragmented knowledge – about technical, administrative, planning and management data - negatively affects the efficiency of interventions in terms of time and costs. All these issues have been addressed with the interdisciplinary research project entitled IMASS CHAIN (Infrastructure Management Support System Chain) carried out by the University of Cagliari in partnership with the companies Leonardo S.p.A. and Flosslab S.r.l., and co-financed by the Italian Ministry of Defence, with the resources of the National Military Research Plan 2020. Starting from the existing heterogeneous information about the patrimony, this project aims to create an innovative 'certified' and 'protected' protocol of 'intelligent' management and governance for defence structures, arriving at functional and logistic models for different infrastructure categories, relevant in the national scale. It transforms, therefore, the information into an 'integrated knowledge' thanks to the digitalisation of the information and the creation of an innovative digital heritage file (Digital Enhanced Folder-DEF) that associates heritage building information modelling (HBIM) with the possibilities offered by digital certification processes typical of blockchain and the potential arising from intelligent predictive models. The trial is being carried out on Sardinian case studies relating to four different armed forces, completely representative of the national scenario.