To conceptualise the requirements and shape of construction digital twins, literature often proposes ideal-types and frameworks involving sensorised, real-time, and highly automated systems. While concepts demand significant resource investments and changes to business processes, their benefits remain debatable. To refocus on the needs of construction practice, we propose an alternative characterisation of construction digital twin systems. This study explores the conceptual diversity of useful systems through a framework comprising latency, fidelity, physical-digital connectivity, and analytic capabilities. It uses an engaged scholarship approach to apply this framework to two cases: A construction control room and an underground utility digital twin. Results show that these cases deviate from techno-centric perceptions, exhibiting variations in latency (low to high), fidelity (low to high realism), physical-digital connectivity (loose to tight), and analytic capabilities (descriptive to predictive). We conclude that construction may defy techno-centric stereotypes. Instead of exploring how organisations must adapt to comprehensive technological twins, future research should prioritise contextual needs to develop useful systems that enhance decision-making practices in the field.

Flood risk management in the Netherlands is increasingly adopting decentralized, participatory approaches involving municipalities, property owners, and citizens. This research investigates the theoretical and practical aspects of integrating semantic 3D city models, Building Information Modeling (BIM), and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) within a unified framework to improve flood resilience. The proposed solution utilizes semantic web technologies to effectively link heterogeneous cadastral, building-level, and urban-scale datasets. Through stakeholder engagement, the study demonstrates enhanced data accuracy, interoperability, and informed decision-making capabilities, highlighting key theoretical advancements and insights gained from practical implementation and evaluation.

Complex systems are not entirely decomposable; hence, interdependencies arise at the interfaces in complex projects. When changes occur, significant risks arise at these interfaces as it is hard to identify, manage and visualise the systemic consequences of changes. Particularly problematic are the interfaces in which there are multiple interdependencies, which occur where the boundaries between design components, contracts and organisation coincide, such as between design disciplines. In this paper, we propose an approach to digital twin-based interface management, through an underpinning state-of-the-art review of the existing technical literature and a research agenda to identify the characteristics of future data-driven solutions. We set out an approach to digital twin-based interface management and an agenda for research on advanced methodologies for managing change in complex projects. This agenda includes the need to integrate work on identifying systems interfaces, change propagation and visualisation, and the potential to significantly extend the limitations of existing solutions by using developments in the digital twin, such as linked data, semantic enrichment, network analyses, natural language processing (NLP)-enhanced ontology and machine learning.

Despite the growing emphasis on digital twins in construction, there is limited understanding of how to enable effective human interaction with these systems, limiting their potential to augment decision-making. This paper investigates the research question: “How can construction control rooms be utilized as digital twin interfaces to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of decision-making in the digital twin construction workflow?”. Design science research was used to develop a framework for human-digital twin interfaces, and it was evaluated in a real-world construction project. Findings reveal that control rooms can serve as dynamic interfaces within the digital twin ecosystem, improving coordination efficiency and decision-making accuracy. This finding is significant for practitioners and researchers, as it highlights the role of digital twin interfaces in augmenting decision-making. The paper opens avenues for future studies of human-digital twin interaction and machine learning in construction, such as imitation learning, codifying tacit knowledge, and new HCI paradigms.

Human-Data Interaction is central to the dynamic nature of the construction industry and its growing reliance on substantial data sets. In this paper, we evaluate literature on the topic of Human-Data Interaction across several technologies and concepts within the built environment with the aim of identifying underlying aspects that can lead to an underpinning theory of Human-Data Interaction in the built environment to support advancement of the research in the field. Those aspects were identified as trust, game theory, empowerment of humans, human control, safety, accessibility, enhancing understanding, and the three pillars of Human-Data Interaction of agency, legibility, and negotiability.

The field of construction informatics is fragmented and lacks clarity in understanding the interconnection of different data management strategies. This makes it challenging to address industry-specific data management issues. Using a critical interpretive synthesis, this study reviews and integrates both present and emerging data management approaches in construction informatics. The review is meant to be comprehensive, encompassing technologies and concepts such as Open Schema, Information Container, Common Data Environments, Linked Data, as well as cutting-edge Web3 technologies such as blockchain and decentralized data protocols. The different approaches are identified and classified into five categories and mapped into a two-dimensional framework that considers data storage and data processing modes. The systematic categorization provides a simple, but comprehensive understanding of data management strategies in construction informatics. Moreover, the framework allows to identify the state of the art and trends of data management approaches, providing guidance for future research perspectives, especially in the intersection with Web3 technologies.

Design for manufacturing and assembly (DfMA) is an engineering methodology which aims to increase ease of manufacture and efficiency of assembly by considering manufacturing and assembly constraints in the design process. However, current DfMA approaches in the construction sector are not automated enough to identify the design features that may cause project delay in real time. This leads to longer design cycle. Also, current scheduling algorithms rely on human intervention to generate activity network from a design output. Addressing these inefficiencies, we propose an interpretative machining learning model to predict the construction duration given a design output. More importantly, the same model identifies the design features that may cause the most delay in the project. The model is trained on a residential design dataset with various features, such as layout, geometry, and element typology. The output of the model is the project duration and an importance map, indicating the influence each feature of the given design has on the total project duration. The results from this model can considerably reduce the design cycle by supporting architects to create fabrication and assembly aware design even when they have little knowledge of production and assembly processes. This model will contribute to a novel computational approach for DfMA.

Purpose: This paper aims to conduct a qualitative assessment of synergies between information flows of a multifamily product platform used for industrialized housing and materials passports that can promote a circular economy in the construction industry. Design/methodology/approach: Using a single case study method, the research assesses the availability and accessibility of materials passport-relevant information generated by a leading Swedish industrialized housing construction firm. Data is collected using semistructured interviews, document analysis and an extended research visit. Findings: The research findings identify the functional layers of the product platform, map the information flow using a process diagram, assess the availability and accessibility of material passport relevant information by lifecycle stage and actor, and summarize the key points using a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis. Research limitations/implications: The three main implications are: the technical and process platforms used in industrialized construction allow for generating standardized, digital and reusable information; the vertical integration of trades and long-term relationships with suppliers improve transparency and reduce fragmentation in information flows; and the design-build-operate business model strategy incentivizes actors to manage information flows in the use phase. Practical implications: Industrialized construction firms can use this paper as an approach to understand and map their information flows to identify suitable approaches to generate and manage materials passports. Originality/value: The specific characteristics of product platforms and industrialized construction provide a unique opportunity for circular information flow across the building lifecycle, which can support material passport adoption to a degree not often found in the traditional construction industry.

Long-term access to lifecycle data is key to a successful transition towards a circular built environment. However, the underlying technology often remains centralized and risks becoming inaccessible over time. In this paper, we investigate whether decentralized access methods using Web3, i.e. blockchain and decentralized data storage protocols, can help to mitigate this limitation. We implement Web3 data access mechanisms for a material passport with both a role-based and a token-based smart contract. Initial results suggest that Web3 offers a promising approach to data access over the lifecycle of a built asset-but only with careful design choices.

In the realm of construction production control, effective communication across operational levels and the rapid influx of diverse data are essential. Yet, integrating this data faces challenges due to disparate systems and a lack of common terminology, resulting in data silos and hindered interoperability. An ontology-based solution emerges as promising for enhancing interoperability. This research paper introduces the development, implementation, and assessment of the cSite ontology, encompasses several crucial facets necessary for efficient production control such as location, activities, and documents. To evaluate its practicality, a real-case study was conducted, wherein the ontology was employed to answer competency questions through SPARQL queries. Furthermore, interactive dashboards, situated within the construction control rooms, were developed to present the information visually. This paper underscores the transformative potential of integrated and visualised production information in construction projects. Additionally, it illuminates how the cSite ontology can facilitate the development and implementation of construction digital twins.

Ontologies play a pivotal role in knowledge representation, particularly beneficial for the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) sector due to its inherent data diversity and intricacy. Despite the growing interest in ontology and data integration research, especially with the advent of knowledge graphs and digital twins, a noticeable lack of consolidated academic synthesis still needs to be addressed. This review paper aims to bridge that gap, meticulously analysing 142 journal articles from 2000 to 2021 on the application of ontologies in the AEC sector. The research is segmented through systematic evaluation into ten application domains within the construction realm- process, cost, operation/maintenance, health/safety, sustainability, monitoring/control, intelligent cities, heritage building information modelling (HBIM), compliance, and miscellaneous. This categorisation aids in pinpointing ontologies suitable for various research objectives. Furthermore, the paper highlights prevalent limitations within current ontology studies in the AEC sector. It offers strategic recommendations, presenting a well-defined path for future research to address these gaps.

Material passports have been proposed to collect, store, and share material information to promote circularity in the construction sector. However, the current recommendations for material passports focus on material information at a building scale with little attention to its implications on a city scale. To address this limitation, this paper provides directions for developing a material passport ontology that could be used to collect, store, share, and retrieve data at multiple scales of abstraction. It describes the requirements for a material passport ontology and provides recommendations for integrating existing ontologies. This paper is relevant to researchers developing information management platforms to enable a circular economy.

A pronounced gap often exists between expected and actual safety performance in the construction industry. The multifaceted causes of this performance gap are resulting from the misalignment between design assumptions and actual construction processes that take place on-site. In general, critical factors are rooted in the lack of interoperability around the building and work-environment information due to its heterogeneous nature. To overcome the interoperability challenge in safety management, this paper represents the development of an ontological model consisting of terms and relationships between these terms, creating a conceptual information model for construction safety management and linking that ontology to IfcOWL. The developed ontology, named Safety and Health Exchange (SHE), comprises eight concepts and their relationships required to identify and manage safety risks in the design and planning stages. The main concepts of the developed ontology are identified based on reviewing accident cases from 165 Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations (RIDDOR) and 31 Press Releases from the database of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) in the United Kingdom. Consequently, a semantic mapping between the developed ontology and IfcOWL (the most popular ontology and schema for interoperability in the AEC sector) is proposed. Then several SPARQL queries were developed and implemented to evaluate the semantic consistency of the developed ontology and the cross-mapping. The proposed ontology and cross-mapping gained recognition for its innovation in utilising OpenBIM and won the BuildingSMART professional research award 2020. This work could facilitate developing a knowledge-based system in the BIM environment to assist designers in addressing health and safety issues during the design and planning phases in the construction sector.