Sustainability and Digital Transformation: The New Challenges of the Construction Industry

Dear colleagues,

The construction industry is among the least digitized (McKinsey, 2016). Nevertheless, the industry is the largest in the world, representing circa 13 percent of global GDP. Construction has shown a productivity growth of 1 percent annually for the past two decades, where overruns of time and cost are default. Risk is significant, and overall earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) are bellow 5 percent. Now with the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, the industry may return back to a depression and a vulnerable economic cycle. The industry is more than ready and desperate for disruption and change.

While the construction sector has been slow to adopt innovations in processes and organization, in general, it has not yet embraced new digital technologies. Thus, R&D spending is well behind that of other industries, running at less than 1 percent of revenues, versus 3.5 to 4.5 percent for the auto and aerospace sectors. Unfortunately, this is more than evident in spending on information technology. Although numerous software applications have emerged over the last few years, the sector accounts for less than 1 percent of revenues for construction.

Usually, the digital transformation route leads to disruptive changes which require adoption of new technologies but also require the implementation of a much wider change. This involves numerous aspects relating to the organizational structure and processes and, above all, to the organizational culture. The most tangible changes that digital transformation may bring are a manufacture-led approach to construction and digital platforms, automatic control of production processes, the introduction of robots that support and gradually replace manual labor, the implementation of predictive models for project decision making, a new concept of the relationship with stakeholders, etc. In summary, the impact of the digital transformation will be significant for all company business functions.

Over the last decade, BIM has proudly stood as an enabler of change in construction. It represents the use of a shared digital representation of a built asset to facilitate design, construction, and operation processes to form a reliable basis for decisions (BS EN ISO 19650-1:2018). BIM facilitates early supply chain and operational team involvement and thus unlocks more efficient and transparent ways of concept, planning, designing, creating, and maintaining built assets over their whole lifecycle. However, despite its popularity, BIM without a sustainable digital transformation of process and organization has little chance for long-term success and sustainable business. For these reasons, digital transformation needs to be understood as part of an organizational strategy with the aim to create value on the entire value chain.

The objective of this call is to develop and demonstrate both theoretical and practical insights that will enable the exploitation of new and emerging digital technologies, data, and analytics to enhance the built environment, thereby driving up commercial competitiveness and productivity of the construction industry.

Specific topics include but are not limited to:

• Digital transformation of construction processes and organization;
• Managerial and organizational implications of digitalization;
• Next-generation building information modeling (BIM) platforms;
• Industry 4.0 and Internet of Things in asset management;
• Digital twins and smarter cities;
• Manufacture-led approach to construction and digital platforms;
• Designing and building with materials of future;
• Digital collaboration, from paper to projects, from office to workforce;
• Digital construction and manufacturing skills.

Assoc. Prof. Mladen Vukomanovic
Assist. Prof. Michał Juszczyk
Guest Editors

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• digital transformation
• construction industry
• BIM
• Industry 4.0
• digital twins
• digital platforms
• materials of future