Please cite this article in press as: A.J. Prieto Ibá ˜ nez, et al., Expert system for predicting buildings service life under ISO 31000 standard. Application in architectural heritage, Journal of Cultural Heritage (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.culher.2015.10.006 ARTICLE IN PRESS G Model CULHER-3004; No. of Pages 10 Journal of Cultural Heritage xxx (2015) xxx–xxx Available online at ScienceDirect www.sciencedirect.com Original article Expert system for predicting buildings service life under ISO 31000 standard. Application in architectural heritage Andrés José Prieto Ibá ˜ nez a,* , Juan Manuel Macías Bernal a , María José Chávez de Diego b , Francisco Javier Alejandre Sánchez a a Department Architectural Construction II, University of Seville, Seville, Spain b Department Applied Mathematics I, University of Seville, Seville, Spain a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 12 June 2015 Accepted 30 October 2015 Available online xxx Keywords: Architectural heritage Expert system Fuzzy logic Service life Risk management Prediction a b s t r a c t The expert system for predicting the service life of buildings, fuzzy buildings service life (FBSL), is a com- puter application that contributes to the preventive conservation of architectural heritage. It establishes the process for evaluating and analysing the vulnerability and the main risks for heritage buildings, managing durability and service life according to their functionality. This paper demonstrates, after a detailed study and analysis of the two main reference standards in the field of risk management, namely the international standard ISO 31000:2009 and the European standard EN 31010:2011, that the FBSL expert system has been developed in compliance with the specifications established in these standards. This research justifies the use of this method, based on a new expert system that predicts the future service life of homogeneous heritage sites worldwide. This model manages the risk affecting these build- ings and also complies with the aforementioned standards. Finally, the practical application of the FBSL expert prediction system was carried out through the study of a specific architectural heritage site. © 2015 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The service life of a building is established as its “bearing capacity, namely the capacity of a building to guarantee, with the necessary degree of reliability, the stability of the overall building and the nec- essary resilience, for a certain period of time, referred to as period of service” [1]. The analysis of this concept is included in international standard ISO 15686:2014 [2]. The assessment of the conservation status of a building and its durability over time is related to the components that make up the building, and are sensitive to events that generate one or various consequences, vulnerabilities. Extrinsic actions are considered to be effects of uncertainty in the building or risks [3,4]. Vulnerabilities and risks have been analysed in different ways [5]. In any case, the main aim of this study was to assess conser- vation status in architecture [6] including interactions with nature [7,8], static-structural and anthropic factors [9]. Haagenrud [10] shows that different agents cause deterioration, generating direct and indirect consequences in terms of building * Corresponding author. Tel.: +34 637 744 525. E-mail addresses: andpriiba@alum.us.es (A.J. Prieto Ibá ˜ nez), jmmacias@us.es (J.M. Macías Bernal), mjchavez@us.es (M.J. Chávez de Diego), falejan@us.es (F.J. Alejandre Sánchez). maintenance and repair costs. The service life of buildings is an important element in the socioeconomic stability of contemporary societies, representing fifty per cent of the wealth of most European countries at the beginning of this century. The gradual degradation of architectural heritage buildings over time full concerns among users and influences their needs and expectations, prompting a significant increase in research into the buildings service life [11,12]. Until now, different predictive models [13–15] have been used to forecast the durability of architectonical elements [16,17], together with intelligent systems for regulating and controlling their installations. Modelled fuzzy in research to diagnose patholo- gies in architectural heritage [18] and in studies related with structural swings in the event of seismic tremors [19]. Neural net- work systems for controlling ventilation and wind chill among other applications [20,21]. The literature contains partial studies of building construction system; Vieira et al. [18] applies a fuzzy model to calculate the physical life of materials. In contrast, the fuzzy building service life (FBSL) is a universal model developed by Macías-Bernal et al. [9] that classifies the func- tionality of a group of buildings with homogeneous characteristics based on inputs as the result of a system output. This expert system is, in fact, the first to combine the concept of building vulnerability with the external risks to which the building is subject. This model http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.culher.2015.10.006 1296-2074/© 2015 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.