The restoration of cultural heritage was an effort that focused largely on traditional surveying techniques and did not gain from its contemporary technologies but with the introduction of BIM to the restoration field, things have evolved. HBIM technology allows users to create models of cultural heritage structures that are semantically rich, open for collaborative work, and easily shareable. Based on that, the aim of this paper will be to give the necessary steps for the creation of these models and will propose various applications that can serve in the restoration process.

This study has a concept/execution structure, which means that methodologies are presented in the first part and then applied in the second. Multiple cases of restoration projects have been used as concrete examples to illustrate the various possibilities that revolve around the creation of a HBIM and the usage of it. The execution phase shows the creative process behind the L5/06 building, its structure follows some of the diverse steps introduced in the concept which are: the data acquisition phase, the processing phase, the modeling phase and finally the browsing phase. The created model is designed to be viewed and interacted with on browsing platforms such as Autodesk Viewer, without compromising its semantic structure, this takes the form of its parametric objects. The results of this study were successful and the model in question is accessible to browsing on the Autodesk Viewer portal. The majority of elements can be selected and can inform the user about the structural and analytical properties of the instance.

The creation process behind the model proved that Revit has some limitations and that it is not always the most appropriate software for HBIM. Due to the nature of the modeled building, a majority of the wanted specificities were showcased but others from the various use-cases present in the study were not applicable. The presented analysis in this study aims at giving the reader an insight into HBIM and presents leads for the development of this technology.