APPLICATION OF DELPHI METHOD IN CONSTRUCTION ENGINEERING AND MANAGEMENT RESEARCH: A QUANTITATIVE PERSPECTIVE

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to summarize the latest research of BIM adoption in construction engineering and management (CEM) and propose research directions for future scholarly work. During the recent decade, building information modeling (BIM) has gained increasing applications and research interest in the construction industry. Although there have been review-based studies that summarized BIM-based research in the overall architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) area, there is limited review that evaluates the current stage of BIM-based research specifically in the CEM sub-area.Design/methodology/approachCEM falls into the scope of AEC. It involves construction-related tasks, activities and processes (e.g. scheduling and cost estimates), issues (e.g. constructability), as well as human factors (e.g. collaboration). This study adopted a holistic literature review approach that incorporates bibliometric search and scientometric analysis. A total of 276 articles related to BIM applied in CEM were selected from Scopus as the literature sample for the scientometric analysis.FindingsSome key CEM research areas (e.g. CEM pedagogy, integrated project delivery, lean and off-site construction) were identified and evaluated. Research trends in these areas were identified, and analyses were carried out with regard to how they could be integrated with BIM. For example, BIM, as a data repository for ACE facilities, has substantial potential to be integrated with a variety of other digital technologies, project delivery methods and innovative construction techniques throughout the whole process of CEM.Practical implicationsAs BIM is one of the key technologies and digital platforms to improve the construction productivity and collaboration, it is important for industry practitioners to be updated of the latest movement and progress of the academic research. The industry, academics and governmental authorities should work with joint effort to fill the gap by first recognizing the current needs, limitations and trends of applying BIM in the construction industry. For example, it needs more understanding about how to address technical interoperability issues and how to introduce the integrated design and construction delivery approach for BIM implementation under the UK BIM Level 2/3 framework.Originality/valueThis study contributed to the body of knowledge in BIM by proposing a framework leading to research directions including the differences of BIM effects between design-bid-build and other fast-track project delivery methods; the integration of BIM with off-site construction; and BIM pedagogy in CEM. It also addressed the need to investigate the similarities and differences between academia and industry toward perceiving the movement of BIM in construction field work.

Review studies are critical in all knowledge domains to benchmark the state-of-the-art at a given point in time and to identify possible future research directions. Due to the fragmented and ever evolving nature of the construction industry, research in the field of construction engineering and management (CEM) is growing exponentially. Researchers across the world are publishing reviews in CEM and the body of knowledge of reviews in this field has become large and significant. While considering literature reviews in CEM as a separate class of CEM research, there has been no attempt to date to analyze and document publication trends and to summarize methods and approaches being utilized in drafting these reviews. Moreover, there is no documented reference that tracks or highlights the concentration or scarcity of literature reviews in various domains and sub-domains of CEM research. Following the PRISMA protocol, this systematic literature review (SLR) aims to benchmark the existing reviews in the field of CEM and to chart the growth of interest of researchers in publishing reviews. A total of 549 review studies were obtained from the Scopus database, as of 20 December 2024, based on relevance, accessibility, and other inclusion and exclusion criteria adopted for this review. Bibliometric analysis shows an exponential annual growth in review studies with Australia, China, US, Hong Kong, and the UK leading this growth. According to the metrics, the journal of Automation in Construction has published the largest number of reviews in the field of CEM. Reviews focusing on applications of robots, automation, and digital technologies in construction constitute about 52% of the reviews published in CEM. Part of this review employed various models of ChatGPT for data extraction from shortlisted articles, therefore risk of bias was minimized by using the tool for simple tasks only. This review is one of its kind and the analysis and findings presented herein are expected to assist researchers in conducting more focused reviews in CEM in the future.

Extended reality (XR) technologies are increasingly being used as a novel research instrument to facilitate scientific inquires in the construction engineering and management (CEM) domain. By allowing humans to interact with immersive environments in controlled and monitored experimental settings, XR technologies have opened new opportunities for researchers to conduct CEM research involving human participants or concerning human behavior. Yet, XR-enabled research, as an independent, rigorous methodology for the CEM domain, is still underexplored. This paper serves as an effort to build an organized knowledge base and workflow for using XR technologies in various CEM research areas and methodological contexts. The paper first investigates the status quo of XR-enabled CEM research, by identifying current research areas in the CEM domain where XR technologies are considered the preferred or recommended methodological solutions. A process model for XR-enabled research is then proposed, with actionable recommendations about how XR-enabled research should be planned, designed, implemented, analyzed, verified, and validated. This process model is demonstrated with two illustrative case studies. Last, the paper discusses the philosophical, methodological, and technological roots of the evolution of XR-enabled CEM research and describes our vision of more enabling, adoptable, and value-adding XR-enabled research in CEM in the near future.

Several data-based metrics have been developed to evaluate the quality of research output, including h-index, impact factor, and others. Considerable debates have focused on whether the aforementioned metrics represent effective and efficient indications of research impact or just provide an imperfect reflection. Because the academic community is witnessing a growing trend where most of the tangible rewards are related to publications and their quality, there is a dire necessity to obtain a more realistic and holistic understanding of such evaluation indicators. As such, the goal of this paper is to investigate the parameters associated with the citation metrics used to assess the quality and impact of research publications in the broad civil engineering (CE) domain with a focus on the construction engineering and management (CEM) specialty area and its subdisciplines. To this end, the authors (1) analyzed the different CE research areas—including CEM—with respect to the number of publications, community size, and potential ties with other interdisciplinary fields; (2) studied the citation metrics of the most-cited as well as award-winning peer-reviewed publications in both CE and CEM while examining the effect of the availability of research funds as well as the nature of the research—quantitative or qualitative—on the average number of citations for most-cited publications across the different CE specialty areas; and (3) investigated the impact of multiple factors on the citation metrics. Based on a thorough survey and analysis of 67,800 journal publications, it was found that both number of publications and citation metrics for the CEM specialty area is significantly lower compared with other CE specialty areas. Along the same vein, the citations across the various CEM subdisciplines are all different, where labor and personnel (306 average citations per paper) and contracting (266 average citations per paper) are the most cited, but cost and schedule (47 average citations per paper) and legal and contractual (23 average citations per paper) are the least cited. Also, with the exception of aerospace engineering as well as engineering education and practices, CEM was the least funded, had the highest percentage of qualitative research, and the least average number of citations for funded/unfunded projects as well as qualitative/quantitative research. Further, it was revealed that award-winning papers—which supposedly represent the highest quality—are not highly cited and in fact have way below average citation numbers. Ultimately, it was found that several factors such as research community size, trendiness of research field, amount of research output, connection with other interdisciplinary fields, characteristics and attributes of coauthors, timing of checking an h-index, publication access type, and the criteria adopted by the various archiving databases collectively affect the citation metrics for papers and authors. As such, citation metrics like h-index should not be used solely to assess the quality and impact of an author but rather be utilized as a single piece of information within a more holistic and broader context. This study furnishes various parameters and considerations that should be normalized before attempting to compare citations of papers and/or authors across the CE domain.

Construction engineering and management (CEM) involves multiple stakeholders, complex interest relationships, and conflicts. All stakeholders must comprehensively consider the interests relating to a project to make decisions. Appropriate multi-agent decision-making can effectively coordinate and integrate the needs or expectations of all stakeholders, which can reduce conflicts, improve the success probability of the project, maximize the overall returns on interest, and contribute to the project’s sustainability. Existing studies have begun to explore the associated theoretical framework and practical methods for multi-agent decision-making. However, early studies mainly focused on the conceptual theories of decision-making models and processes, such as stakeholder analysis, decision evaluation, and risk management. In recent years, increasing research has concerned the application of multi-agent decision-making in CEM. This paper is the first to use a comprehensive review approach to analyze multi-agent decision-making in CEM, providing an overall perspective. In this paper, 105 journal papers are identified and classified into four categories: (1) main concerns regarding multi-agent decision-making in CEM; (2) tools and methods of multi-agent decision-making in practice; (3) research tools and methods of multi-agent decision-making in CEM; (4) critical points on how to solve multi-agent decision-making problems. The findings of this study offer references for future trends in four regards, namely (1) knowledge management, (2) decision resilience, (3) the fusion of many techniques, and (4) technologies for future research.

Roles of artificial intelligence in construction engineering and management: A critical review and future trends

With the extensive development and application of information technologies in construction engineering and management (CEM), the construction site is experiencing a rapid digital revolution and transformation. Since smart construction site has become the current research trend and one of the most hot topics, thus this study adopted an integrated bibliometric approach and quantitative analysis to explore the global research on smart construction site. As it is indicated in the content, the bibliometric and scientometric method-based literature review was carried out in this study. To be specific, the co-citation analysis in terms of author, document, and journal; the collaboration analysis in terms of authorship, institutions, and country/region; and category analysis, as well as cluster analysis and burst analysis were conducted based on 2206 peer-reviewed academic papers, which were published from January 2000 to February 2021. It is found that there has been an explosion of relevant publications especially in the past 10 years along with the changing of keywords from flexibility approach to information technologies, 3D reconstruction, IoT technologies, virtual reality, and others. Moreover, the results indicated that the collaborations and cooperation among different institutions, countries, and authors are not close enough, and the most significant research and development in smart construction occurred primarily in the USA, China, and England. Additionally, the smart construction site’s relevant research in terms of publication of quantity was doubled every five years. In addition, the smart construction site relevant research has gradually changed from the traditional project performance associated indicators to smart simulation applications and scenes. Lastly, implementation and management-related concerns about smart construction sites are discussed with seven topics. This study provides researchers and practitioners not merely with an in-depth understanding of the characters and also the trend of smart construction site research in the construction engineering and management field.

Construction engineering and management (CEM) research over the past 50 years has focused on extending and applying management and computer science approaches to minimize cost during the implementation phase of construction projects. Three emerging trends suggest the need to broaden the frame of future CEM research in several ways: (1) more integrated delivery of design, planning, construction, and operation of buildings and infrastructure requires us to broaden the focus of construction engineering and management research across the entire facility lifecycle; (2) rapid globalization of the construction industry requires new governance structures for projects that can bridge across the gaps in values, beliefs, norms, work practices, and laws between participants from different countries; and (3) heightened global awareness of, and demands for, enhanced sustainability requires new approaches, methods, and tools to incorporate sustainability issues in the early phases of the facility development process. Building on ASCE's 2006 Vision for the Future of Civil Engineering. This paper elaborates each of these three trends and draws implications for refocusing and redirecting construction engineering and management research, education, and civic leadership in the next 50 years.

Neuro-fuzzy systems in construction engineering and management research

The quantitative methodological biased debate in the 1990s in Construction Engineering and Management (CEM) Research resulted in researchers considering alternative methodologies. However, a follow up study in 2007 established that CEM remained dominated by quantitative research with only 8.4% of the studies surveyed exclusively using qualitative methods. A decade on, this remains a challenge and an update is overdue. Hence, an investigation to establish the current position regarding the methodological pluralism within CEM research was conducted. A total number of 4,166 articles spanning from 2000 to 2017 were examined from three reputable journals and tier 1 conference. The articles were categorised by the research method(s) used. Overwhelmingly, it was found there are acceptable multi-epistemologies within CEM research and there is a shifted from a dominance of quantitative to an increased utilization of qualitative methodologies and the use of mixed methodologies have shown hopeful progression. The demography of the data was also analysed and discussed. It is concluded that there is an increasing acceptance of methodological pluralism and CEM and its industry are on the verge of experiencing a competitive advantage, which could result in improved performances with utilization of balanced research methodologies (if applied appropriately).

With the growing use of Building Information Modeling (BIM) and allied technologies such as energy modeling, laser scanning and surveying, graduates of construction engineering and management (CEM) programs need an increasing number of computer technology concepts and skills. CEM programs across the country are updating their curriculum offerings to include computing generally and Building Information Modeling (BIM) specifically. In this paper, we focus on the question of Building Information Modeling in the context of graduate education and specifically ask in what ways should software generally and BIM specifically be incorporated into CEM graduate education? In this paper we present a review of CEM graduate programs and discuss ways that computer technology generally and BIM specifically can be incorporated into the curriculum. This paper will include the results of a survey of industry professionals to determine if, how and in what ways BIM education is valued by the industry. A majority of BIM managers surveyed thought that graduate education is important for BIM professionals. From this survey, we see a coupled need: technological education in the context of CEM topics. Our review of current graduate coursework in CEM aligns with the survey findings in that BIM courses focus on the CEM uses of technology and some are application specific (e.g., estimating) while others are project focused (e.g. design team coordination). This findings suggests that BIM workflow could be incorporated into many of the CEM topic coursework as BIM become more prevalent in the industry.

ABSTRACTThe performance of construction industry is largely supported by the competence and skills generated by Construction Engineering and Management (CEM) programs offered in the country. A review of published literature points to scarcity of studies evaluating performance of curricula with respect to generating the requisite skills. In an attempt to assess the efficiency of CEM programs offered in Pakistan, this study identifies the key knowledge areas, technical skills, and expertise that these programs need to focus on for sufficiently preparing the post graduating students entering modern and complex construction industry. In doing so, two universities (NEDUET and NUST) offering mature CEM program at postgraduate level have been engaged. Based on a questionnaire survey of CEM graduates, employers and academicians, it is found that the program content is adequately designed and delivered by well versed and competent instructors. Generally, a high degree of agreement for technical skills is found among the perceptions of graduates and the expectations of the industry. However, some major challenges are identified which if addressed can help boost the satisfaction level of students. Acknowledging the possibility for improvement, recommendations for curricula updates in order to bridge the gap between academia and industry are proposed.

Over the last two decades, social network analysis (SNA) approach has gained increasing popularity as an advanced tool in Construction Engineering and Management (CEM) field due to the emerging viewpoint of viewing projects as organizational networks. However, limited studies are available on a systematic review of the use of this tool in CEM field. Therefore, this paper aims to fill this gap by reviewing the SNA papers published in nine selected peer-reviewed journals from 1998 to 2015 to ascertain the state of the art. Based on a three-stage review, 45 papers were identified. It was found that scholars from the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia published the most number of SNA-based papers, which indicated universities (institutions) and scholars from these countries enjoy significant advantage in SNA-based research. The review results provide practical references for future SNA enable applications in CEM research.

Applications of fuzzy hybrid techniques in construction engineering and management research

Construction is a dynamic sociotechnical process, consisting of ongoing interdependencies between people and the built environment. Accordingly, finding solutions to construction challenges when they arise requires understanding the interactions between social and technical factors. Over the past three decades, qualitative methods have been increasingly applied in construction engineering and management (CEM) research to understand challenges within this industry. However, there remains a lack of resources in the CEM literature on qualitative method selection and implementation specifically applicable to this domain. Without such guidance, it can be challenging to choose the most appropriate research methods, which can limit theoretical and practical contributions. To begin to address this gap, this paper offers an overview and comparison of three qualitative data analysis techniques—ranging in their use of induction, prevalence in CEM research, and ability to answer different types of research questions. These analysis techniques are applied to the same semi-structured interview data drawn from a case study on water infrastructure in rural Alaska. Insights gained from each method are compared to illustrate the utility of each technique. To the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first qualitative method-comparison paper published for a CEM audience. Based on the comparison findings, choosing a deductive content analysis can allow for full characterization and quantification of a data set and discussion of results in relation to a predefined framework, such as a framework based on design and construction standards. A hybrid content analysis can expose new, detailed insights for an existing framework by allowing emergent themes to arise and be quantified. Conversely, a constant comparative analysis can reveal emergent trends and uncover the reasons why these trends occur based on connections between prominent themes, which can help CEM researchers develop new theories. Overall, this study helps advance the sociotechnical side of CEM research by enabling the discipline to better address the industry’s complex challenges.