The upsurge of digitalization in many sectors has been associated with better environmental outcomes. Recent policy change and international convergence has shown Net Zero (NZ) vision as a means of controlling global greenhouse gas emissions. This article focuses on construction sector and the complex transition to NZ through digital twins (DTs). It does so via a system thinking approach, 53 interviews, and 2 focus groups with DT experts. The key factors of this dual 'digital and green' transition are breaking down silos, collaborating across the supply chain and the need for a data-oriented approach in analyzing input, processing, and output of the DTs. Apart from unravelling the factors on how individual (asset) DTs can support NZ, their aggregates in a connected DT system of systems are also crucial to addressing the complexity of this transition at a larger scale. The article also offers new insights on the orchestrators of such system of DT systems and their governance mechanisms in meeting NZ. Additionally, one emergent finding relates to the evolution of associated concepts and terminologies. By identifying the complexity factors, this article also contributes to the management of increased risk that accompanies growing complexity.

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Purpose:
This study aims to investigate the complexity factors associated with BIM-enabled projects. BIM has been widely promoted as a potential solution to numerous challenges that hinder productivity in construction projects, owing to its numerous advantages. Nevertheless, it is crucial to acknowledge the heightened complexity it introduces to project workflows, stakeholder coordination and information management.

Design/methodology/approach:
This study employs the Delphi method to identify and extract complexity factors specific to BIM-enabled projects. A panel of industry and academic experts is engaged to discern and prioritise these factors based on their expertise and knowledge.

Findings:
The study reveals a comprehensive list of 34 complexity factors that significantly impact BIM-enabled projects. Among the most influential factors are laws and regulations, variety of procurement methods, technical capabilities of teams, project manager competence, information transfer capacity, range of project deliverables and diversity of project locations. The findings highlight the importance of these factors and emphasise the need for proactive and adaptive management to navigate their impact and achieve positive project outcomes.

Originality/value:
This study introduces the DEBACCS framework, a metric-based model designed to understand and evaluate complexity within BIM-enabled projects. DEBACCS stands for seven key dimensions: diversity, emergence, belonging, autonomy, connectivity, context and size. These dimensions represent essential aspects for gauging project complexity. By applying the concept of complexity from project management to BIM, the study offers valuable insights for practitioners and researchers. It provides a unique perspective on the challenges and considerations associated with implementing and managing BIM in construction projects. The findings have practical value for practitioners, enabling them to better understand and address the implications of complexity in BIM-enabled projects, ultimately leading to improved project outcomes.

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Purpose Information management workflow in building information modelling (BIM)-based collaboration is based on using a common data environment (CDE). The basic premise of a CDE is exposing all relevant data as a single source of truth and facilitating continuous collaboration between stakeholders. A multitude of tools can be used as a CDE, however, it is not clear how the tools are used or if they fulfil the users’ needs. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate current practices of using CDEs for information management during the whole built asset’s life cycle, through a state-of-the-art literature review and an empirical study. Design/methodology/approach Literature data is collected according to the PRISMA 2020 guideline for reporting systematic reviews. This paper includes 46 documents in the review and conduct a bibliometric and thematic analysis to identify the main challenges of digital information management. To understand the current practice and the views of the stakeholders using CDEs in their work, this paper used an empirical approach including semi-structured interviews with 15 BIM experts. Findings The results indicate that one of the major challenges of CDE adoption is project complexity and using multiple CDEs simultaneously leading to data accountability, transparency and reliability issues. To tackle those challenges, the use of novel technologies in CDE development such as blockchain could be further investigated. Originality/value The research explores the major challenges in the practical implementation of CDEs for information management. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study on this topic combining a systematic literature review and fieldwork.@en

Sociotechnical transitions are mostly seen in the literature as processes where actors and technologies in small niches peripheral to an organizational field, accumulate momentum, scale up, aggregate, and eventually bring about large-scale regime change. Foundational examples include the British transition from sailing ships to steamships and the American transition from traditional factories to mass production. Herein lies a paradox, transitions concern large scale system change for example transition to electric cars or renewable energy, but large-scale options for technological change driven by incumbents have received less attention in transitions research. This is an important opportunity for transition research to draw on the literature of project management research on large-scale projects. We bridge transitions research and project management research by exploring speciation and aggregation from both perspectives. We illustrate how this bridge may be instantiated drawing on published research and interviews on six megaprojects that have been instrumental in the digital transformation of UK construction: (i) the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, (ii) Heathrow Terminal 5, (iii) London Olympics, (iv) Crossrail, (v) Thames Tideway and (vi) High Speed Two. The speciation of digital technology seeds the process of aggregation and UK industry transition which is driven by incumbents at the organizational field core and ripples outward to its periphery. This is a reverse process to the one mostly considered in transition research where change initiates in small niches peripheral to an organizational field and propagates until it eventually brings about large-scale change to its core.@en

Purpose
This research investigates the distinct characteristics of blockchain technology to safeguard against the deterioration of handover information quality in the post-construction phase. The significance of effective management of handover information is highlighted by global building failures, such as the Grenfell Tower fire in London, UK. Despite existing technological interventions, there remains a paucity of understanding regarding the factors contributing to the decline in the quality of handover information during the post-construction phase.

Design/methodology/approach
This study employed a multi-case studies approach across five higher education institutions. It involved conducting semi-structured interviews with 52 asset management professionals, uncovering the underlying reasons for the decline in handover information quality. Building on these insights, the study performed a mapping exercise to align these identified factors with blockchain technology features and information quality dimensions, aiming to evaluate blockchain’s potential in managing quality handover information.

Findings
The study findings suggest that blockchain technology offers advantages but has limitations in addressing all the identified quality issues of managing handover information. Due to the lack of an automated process and file-based information exchange, updating handover information still requires an error-prone manual process, leading to potential information loss. Additionally, no solutions are available for encoding drawings for updates and validation.

Originality/value
This study proposes a framework integrating blockchain to enhance the information management process and improve handover information quality.@en

In today’s society, project work gains traction across many industries. As projects are characterised by novelty and uncertainty, emerging digital technologies promise solutions that improve performance and help deliver full benefits. Amidst this digitisation, digital technologies such as data analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) streamline the large amount of data generated. However, this critical information is only partially leveraged during and after projects to date. Project data are generated, collected, and analysed across all stages of project management and delivery. Eleni Papadonikolaki and Carlos Galera-Zarco conceptualise the relation between projects, information, and data, and discuss key application areas of data analytics in projects, for instance in scheduling and costing. Next, they present the state-of-the-art applications, means, and tools of data analytics in key areas of project management. Finally, they set out challenges and future opportunities around project data analytics especially with regard to leadership, teamwork, and talent management.@en

Modularity is an approach to simplify systems and reduce complexity. However, existing research suggests that a mono-dimensional modularity strategy, focusing solely on one dimension, such as product, process, or organization, might not fully achieve these goals in design activities. This research investigates how combining strategies from various dimensions of modularity can reduce the complexity of large-scale engineering design. The Huoshenshan Hospital, a 1,000-bed hospital designed and built in 10 days, provided an extreme case study of the first emergency hospital to address COVID-19. The research identified 10 different aspects, termed ‘proximities’, which relate to how people perceive the four dimensions of modularity, specifically across organization–process–product–supply-chain dimensions. Additionally, it identified three types of reinforcement relationships aimed at diminishing complexity in design activities: modular alignment (i.e., synchronized alignment and asynchronous alignment), modular complementarity (i.e., subtraction complement and addition complement), and modular incentive relationships. This research highlights that these three types of reinforcement relationships between different dimensions of modularity can reduce complexity, allowing subsystems to support the system in working as a whole.@en

Purpose
Off-Site Construction (OSC) has received much government and public attention during and after COVID. Building Information Modelling (BIM) is an initiative discussed widely to promote OSC implementation. Although many policy promotions have been published, there are many challenges to implementing BIM and OSC in real life and questions of whether they really offer value to healthcare design professionals. This research aims to investigate BIM and OSC to understand their commonalities and differences of challenges by collecting empirical evidence from China’s healthcare construction.

Design/methodology/approach
This exploratory research adopted a mixed method with a questionnaire survey and interviews. A total of 261 questionnaires were received (with 183 valid), followed by 31 semi-structured interviews.

Findings
This research reveals that although both OSC and BIM face similar adoption challenges and suspicious attitudes in real-life projects, their challenges’ connotations and reasons are different. OSC faces scepticism for its customisation costs and technical constraints, while BIM is seen as limited in utility and complex to integrate. Highlighting these as socio-technical challenges, the research advocates for an integrated framework to effectively implement OSC and BIM, addressing both technical and collaborative needs in healthcare construction.

Originality/value
This research examines OSC and BIM within the context of healthcare construction, a focus that is relatively underexplored. The research provides a juxtaposition of the perceived and practical challenges of adopting these technologies, revealing a gap between the industry’s expectations and the current capabilities of OSC and BIM, thereby contributing to the development of modern methods of design in healthcare.
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Amidst the disruptive backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations are navigating toward a new normal, leveraging digital technologies to reconfigure business processes and operational practices. This study delves into the transformative effects of digitalization on project management, with a focus on integrating data-savvy talent in a data-rich era. Employing a mixed methods approach, data were collected from June to November 2022, providing a comprehensive blend of various perspectives. Quantitative and qualitative methods were adopted successively in this study to explore the formation mechanism of digital competence of talents in project management and analyze the practical experience and expectations on the impact of data-savvy talents on project management. This study highlights the crucial role of organizations in actively shaping digital competencies to align with the changing demands of project management. It also emphasizes the increasing importance of data-savvy talents, whose intrinsic understanding of digital technologies and business models is essential in transforming the project management landscape. The outcomes of this study offer both theoretical insights into the nexus of digital competence, talent management, and project management, and practical guidelines for effectively integrating new talents into project management practices.@en

Digital Fabrication (DFAB) faces challenges in project delivery due to various barriers, such as its complex technical processes and unclear benefits. However, there is no specific research on project delivery methods for DFAB. This study conducts a comparative case study to understand the delivery of projects with varying degrees of DFAB implementation. Modularity theory is used as a lens to explore project delivery methods. This study tentatively proposes strategies for establishing potential project delivery methods for DFAB. The research identifies three key characteristics: 1) the adoption of modular products and processes, 2) the adoption of an integral type of project delivery method, and 3) the significant role of informal relationships in project delivery. The study finds that misalignment relationships at the product, process, and supply chain levels, namely the combination of modular products and processes with integral supply chains, have fostered flexibility and coordination in DFAB project delivery. Theoretically, this study discusses the symbiosis and interrelationship between modularity and integration within the context of project delivery. Practitioners can build on these strategies to establish project delivery methods.@en

Healthcare facilities play a key role in responding United Nations goals, such as sustainability, health and welling. The outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic has driven much attention to expanding healthcare capacity through advanced digital technologies, such as Building Information Modelling (BIM). Nevertheless, a systematic review of research achievements is lacking. This research uses bibliometric and systemic literature review methods to investigate BIM applications in Healthcare Design and Construction (HDC). The bibliometric investigation focuses on country, journal co-citation, and keyword clustering analyses. The systematic review classifies application domains, BIM actions, and other digital technologies accompanying BIM. Finally, 17 major BIM actions are summarized for six major domains, including operability, resilience, collaboration, sustainability and constructability. This study reveals that the outbreak of COVID-19 has greatly stimulated the academic interest in digital technologies for HDC, and there is geographical uniqueness highly relevant to local government policies and national healthcare services. However, related research is still in a relatively preliminary stage.@en

The construction industry increasingly recognizes the potential benefits of cyber-physical systems, particularly Digital Twin (DT) technology, within the framework of Industry 4.0 and Construction 4.0. However, there remains a lack of clarity regarding the specific contributions of DT to the construction sector, often conflated with Building Information Modeling (BIM). This paper aims to address this ambiguity by conducting a historical review of DTs, delineating their key features, and elucidating the opportunities they offer throughout the stages of constructed facilities' life. Additionally, this paper outlines potential research trajectories and practical applications for leveraging DTs to enhance construction project delivery.

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Net Zero relates to decarbonisation efforts to tackle climate change by not adding new emissions to the atmosphere. Reaching Net Zero depends on datafication and digitisation as data on carbon emissions collected across assets’ lifecycle are important for neutralising them. This study aims to understand how technological ecosystems such as Digital Twins – that connect physical and digital artefacts – can support a Net Zero vision in the built environment, in an industry-agnostic way to transfer any relevant lessons from other sectors. The method is a systematic literature review that structures new knowledge on the topic. The study showed that environment sustainability has been an overused idea in scientific literature, yet rarely operationalised. A scarcity of studies utilising the potential of digital twins for Net Zero was found. The emergent themes are: overreliance on technocratic solutions at the expense of systems thinking, proliferation of renewable sources and misunderstandings regarding visualisation necessity, and showing pathways for future DT system design for Net Zero.

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We are witnessing an increased interest and advanced developments of Digital Twins (DT) across different industries; manufacturing, construction, oil and gas, aerospace, energy or healthcare among others. Some actors are already realising that the power of DTs goes beyond efficiency gains and cost savings for internal processes, and recognise the potential of DT to enable the design of new service offerings. Uncovering the potential of DT in the development of new value propositions may lead firms to business model transformations, particularly to the expansion of servitization strategies. Thus, there is a need for more research exploring DT as a service enabler, and shedding light on the typologies and characteristics of these innovative digital services. To address the need for a more comprehensive understanding of DT-based services, we develop a taxonomy able to classify and characterise services enabled by DT. To develop this novel DT-based services taxonomy, we drew upon literature review and use cases. In our ongoing research, four main dimensions emerged to configure a taxonomy of digital twin-based services: service recipient, target operand resource, service content and service pricing model. The proposed taxonomy is intended to be useful in the understanding of the current DT-based service offerings and design principles. In addition, the taxonomy has potential to be used as a practical tool for service providers in the development of new DT-based services.

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Purpose: Rapid advancements in blockchain technology transform various sectors, attracting the attention of industrialists, practitioners, policymakers and academics, and profoundly affect construction businesses through smart contracts and crypto-economics. This paper explores the blockchain innovation ecosystem in construction. Design/methodology/approach: Through a qualitative study of 23 diverse interviewees, the study explores how open or closed the blockchain innovation ecosystem in construction is and who its emerging orchestrators are. Findings: The data showed that construction aims towards an open innovation blockchain ecosystem, although there are elements of hybridisation and closedness, each system pointing out to different orchestrators. Practical implications: The study has implications for governments and large companies in construction, showing that open innovation initiatives need to be encouraged by policymakers through rules, regulations and government-sponsored demonstrator projects. Social implications: The data showed that there is lack of readiness for business model change to support open innovation blockchain ecosystems in construction. Originality/value: This is the first study applying the open innovation theory in the construction industry and sheds light into the phenomenon of blockchain, suggesting routes for further democratisation of the technology for policymakers and practitioners.

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The built environment (BE) is currently undergoing a digital transformation from traditional to digital, affecting among others, architecture. Departing from the implicit assumption of digital technologies (DTs) for economic growth, productivity and performance, we instead focus on employees’ experiences of digital transformation and their well-being. DTs such as building information modelling (BIM) are used by architects at the front end of the project life cycle. As opposed to most past studies on well-being of blue-collar workers, we focus on white-collar workers. Architecture has a traditionally low job satisfaction and high prevalence of stressors that negatively impact well-being, and DTs could potentially affect job satisfaction in terms of creativity, autonomy, time pressure, menial tasks, career prospects, organisational commitment and potential. This chapter builds upon literature review and pilot interviews with healthcare architects/designers who were at the front line of the COVID-19 pandemic with NHS architects, creating new wards and vaccination centres, while private healthcare architects designed new hospitals. Although healthcare architects were in their busiest year, the DTs available to them could only support limited tasks and did not link well to asset operation. We explore how DTs transform the well-being of architects. Understanding well-being in architecture in light of digital transformation is crucial for creating the necessary leadership for the sector to grow.@en

Digital technologies radically change the increasingly complex world of projects, and bring new opportunities and threats to the field. This chapter discusses the potential of blockchain technology for project organising, by looking at the three domains of project organising (Winch, 2014): (a) project-based firms (PBFs), (b) projects and programmes and (c) owners and operators and their interfaces: commercial, resourcing/es, and governance. Through a Systematic Mapping Study (SMS), we first review key applications of blockchain in project organising and afterwards, through a meta-review, we present use cases in project-based sectors. The conclusions are that the opportunities for the permanent interfaces of owners/operators and Project-based Firms (PBFs) abound, especially regarding financing, but without business model innovation, whereas the temporary resourcing interface can benefit from applications in logistics that reduce complex material flows. Although there are blockchain use cases in human resources and governance, these are not fully exploited yet in projects.@en

Transitions are processes of systemic change where niches peripheral to a sociotechnical regime accumulate momentum, scale up and eventually transform its core. In contrast to this dominant narrative in transitions research, infrastructure systems exhibit the reverse process as change propagates from the regime core to its periphery. We explore this under-researched process in the case of digitalization in UK construction. We analyse six UK megaprojects that span more than 30 years as a single longitudinal embedded case, and show how the adoption of digital technologies driven by regime incumbents, seeds the processes of technology adaptation, aggregation, and system transformation. The adoption of digital technologies by incumbents is necessary to cope with megaproject scale and scope. Their adaptation to technology instigates organizational level change that starts at the regime core, accumulates with each project and makes these changes ripple across the industry and transform it.

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The basic premise of a Common Data Environment (CDE) proposed by ISO19650 is exposing all relevant data as a single source of truth for all stakeholders. This work investigates tools currently used as CDE solutions in the industry and their practical challenges. Data was collected through a web search, a survey, and semi-structured interviews with industry professionals. Twelve tools were identified and compared in a desk review providing insights into their strengths and weaknesses. The results show that multiple CDEs are needed throughout the project lifecycle as no tool on the market can provide required functionalities in all lifecycle phases.@en

Purpose: Digital twin (DT) and building information modeling (BIM) are interconnected in some ways. However, there has been some misconception about how DT differs from BIM. As a result, industry professionals reject DT even in BIM-based construction projects due to reluctance to innovate. Furthermore, researchers have repeatedly developed tools and techniques with the same goals using DT and BIM to assist practitioners in construction projects. Therefore, this study aims to assist industry professionals and researchers in understanding the relationship between DT and BIM and synthesize existing works on DT and BIM. Design/methodology/approach: A systematic review was conducted on published articles related to DT and BIM. A total record of 54 journal articles were identified and analyzed. Findings: The analysis of the selected journal articles revealed four types of relationships between DT and BIM: BIM is a subset of DT, DT is a subset of BIM, BIM is DT, and no relationship between BIM and DT. The existing research on DT and BIM in construction projects targets improvements in five areas: planning, design, construction, operations and maintenance, and decommissioning. In addition, several areas have emerged, such as developing geo-referencing approaches for infrastructure projects, applying the proposed methodology to other construction geometries and creating 3D visualization using color schemes. Originality/value: This study contributed to the existing body of knowledge by overviewing existing research related to DT and BIM in construction projects. Also, it reveals research gaps in the body of knowledge to point out directions for future research.

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