A methodology to investigate university building condition for life cycle cost of maintenance

Education buildings are important assets in the universities that are purposely built to provide a conducive and secure environment to the staff and students in facilitating them to execute teaching, learning and academic programmes, research, consultancies, and administrative activities for the development of knowledge, skills, culture, and personality. Nonetheless, in the face of multiple effects of inflation on the economy, the maintenance work for the facilities in university education buildings has become very complex and a thorny issue. There has been a demand to re-examine and improve the practice of university building maintenance methodology by emphasising the optimisation of maintenance life cycle cost to facilitate the university agencies in measuring their longterm financial capability to pay maintenance costs based on the efficient use of capital and resources throughout the service life. This paper is prepared to present the methodology to investigate the university building maintenance condition and operational performance as inputs for developing a life cycle cost of maintenance database prototype. The methods designed for the study are a qualitative research strategy incorporating three fieldwork approaches, i.e., the semistructured interview, building condition assessment (BCA), and quick response codes (QR) approaches. The methodology is proposed to investigate the operational performance and maintenance condition of teaching and learning facilities in the chosen university building case study to produce outputs for the development of prototype of life cycle cost database requirements of university building, which would add value to the core services of the university and in line with the key drivers of Malaysian Science, Technology, Innovation, and Economy (MySTIE) framework.