A Methodological Approach for the Assessment of Potentially Buildable Land for Tax Purposes: The Italian Case Study

According to Italian legislation for a particular type of real property—lands/areas subject to buildability, but not yet currently buildable—there is a problem related to their “qualification”, or whether or not they must be considered buildable for the purposes of their recurrent taxation. These potentially buildable (POBU) areas, that were previously zoned as “agricultural”, have been rezoned as “general urban planning instruments/regulations” (the General Urban Development Plans or variances, which regulate land governance), whose approval path has yet to be concluded. Their value—the taxable base underpinning their taxation—clearly depends on their qualification (whether or not they are considered buildable). This has produced, in recent years, several disputes between owners and local governments; the law did not give univocal solutions: Today (2019), there is a conflict of case law in relation to considering these areas as being building areas, as it is not clear what estimating procedures should be used. This article is thus based on the assumption that responding to the problems connected with taxing POBU areas must be considered separately from (overcoming, in this way, conflicting case law) the “virtual” qualification of agricultural or buildable area, but must instead, and more simply, be considered as the actual condition it is found in (likelihood of having building potential in the future), and therefore its limitations (present at the time of taxation) and the time necessary for the building to actually be built and not just “potential”. The approach proposed in this article thus offers a solution to the problem that has been raised, by modifying the current de jure approach (defining the moment when the building right is manifested) towards an assessment/appraisal approach (defining the value of the potentially buildable (POBU) area, in relation to its actual conditions). To implement this approach, a methodology—proposing an upgrade of the traditional analytic procedure for the assessment of transformation value has been structured in a way such that consideration may be made of the components characterizing the potentially buildable areas by means of appropriate assessment parameters that go towards forming these areas’ value: These are the market value discount rate of the POBU area in relation to the uncertainty and risk of reaching effective and concrete buildability, and the estimated time needed to complete the procedural path for making the area actually buildable.

A Virtual Testing Framework for Engineering Product Development

Virtual testing is a new engineering development trend to design, evaluate, and test new engineered products. This research proposes a virtual testing framework for new product development using three successive steps: (i) statistical model calibration, (ii) hypothesis test for validity check and (iii) virtual qualification. Statistical model calibration first improves the predictive capability of a computational model over a calibration domain. Next, the hypothesis test is performed under limited observed data to see if a calibrated model is sufficiently predictive for virtual testing of a new design. A u-pooling metric is employed for the hypothesis test to measure the degree of mismatch between predicted and observed results while considering uncertainty in the u-pooling metric due to the lack of experimental data. The calibrated model can be rejected only when the measured metric of the calibrated model strongly suggest that the null hypothesis—the calibrated model is valid—is false. If the null hypothesis is accepted, the virtual qualification process can be executed with a qualified model for new product developments. The qualification process builds a design decision matrix to aid in rational decision-making on the product developments. A computational model of a tire tread block was used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Virtual Qualification Using Field Life Temperature Data

A method is presented that converts field life temperature data collected underhood during actual driving conditions into a segmented temperature cycling life cycle profile using rainflow counting techniques. This profile can then be used as the true field condition in performing Physics of Failure based virtual qualification or accelerated testing of an automotive engine control unit operating in an elevated temperature environment. The specific elements of this method and its validation on an engine control unit will be presented.