UAV Applications in the AEC/FM Industry: A Review

Abstract

AbstractUnmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) offers the potential of facilitating various tasks in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Facility Management (AEC/FM) industry. Plenty of research has been conducted in this field, resulting in a large number of publications. This paper thus presents a bibliometric analysis of UAV applications in the field of AEC/FM, intending to identify its research trends and future directions. The literature database, Scopus, was used to collect relevant publications regarding UAV applications in the AEC/FM industry. Several keywords, such as UAV, drone, unmanned aerial system (UAS), AEC, infrastructure, and the forth, were used in the data collection, resulting in 552 research publications. A bibliometric analysis was then conducted using VOSviewer to quantitatively identify the research trends through keyword co-occurrence map and citation networks of collected documents. In addition, a discussion of cluster analysis is provided in this paper to discover challenges in the application of UAVs in the AEC/FM industry. The results indicated that more consideration is demanded in the areas such as indoor path planning, UAV battery limitations, the integration between building information modeling (BIM) and UAV, privacy issues, and the integration between UAV and the internet of things (IoT). This paper contributes to the body of knowledge by quantitatively identifying the research trends and needs for UAV-based AEC/FM applications.