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Industry 4.0 is predicted to be a game-changer, revolutionizing commercial and manufacturing practices through improved knowledge utilization and efficiencies. The barriers however, are significant, and the construction industry remains notoriously slow to take up innovations. This study reviews the research work in Industry 4.0 as it relates to construction, and examines a leading UK-based construction firm to ascertain the prognosis for Industry 4.0 roll-out in terms of the impediments and opportunities.

A multistage mixed philosophies and methods approach was adopted for this study. First, an interpretivist epistemological lens was used to synthesise extant literature as a means of contextualizing the present study. Second, an empirical case study using a post-positivist stance and inductive reasoning was conducted to explore practitioner acceptance of Industry 4.0 in the UK construction context.

Findings from the literature review indicate studies in Industry 4.0 to be a relatively new phenomenon, with developed countries and Germany in particular leading in the field. The range of opportunities are many, but so too are the barriers to enablement. Findings from the case study provide real-world corroboration of the review; practitioners are sanguine about Industry 4.0's potential to reinvigorate the construction industry, but also note that implementation remains curtailed by residual managerial practices dependent on ‘human interaction’. At present, much of the focus of industry practitioners is on the implementation of building information modelling (BIM), often at the expense of other more advanced technologies within Industry 4.0.

Research in Industry 4.0 is limited, with the emphasis being on technology application. This paper, by contrast, maps the totality of work carried out so far and presents an assessment of Industry 4.0's progression, potential and degree of uptake within the UK construction industry.

The advent of Industry 4.0 has engendered opportunities for a coalescence of digital technologies that collectively enable driverless vehicles to operate during the construction and use of a highway. Yet, hitherto scant research has been conducted to review these collective developments and/or sample construction practitioner opinion on them. This study aims to present a systematic review of extant literature on the application of driverless technologies in civil engineering and in particular, the highways infrastructure sector and offers insight into the limitations of associated barriers to full adoption, namely, current technological development processes, legal deficiencies and societal concerns. In so doing, this work presents a vignette of contemporary developments augmented by a critical analysis from practitioners’ perceptions.

A mixed philosophical methodological approach is adopted for this inductive research study. Interpretivism is used to critically analyse the literature and post-positivism to perform content analysis of the literature and synthesis of the discourse with practitioners. A total of 44 related papers published between 1998 and 2019 have been included in this study. Emergent themes identified from literature are then discussed in some further detail, namely, 1) automation and robotics; 2) case studies and simulations; and 3) safety and ergonomics). A focus group is then held with leading industrialists to discuss their experiences of advanced driverless technology applications in practice. Based upon a culmination of emergent evidence, a conceptual model of prevailing barriers is then developed to further elucidate upon the challenges facing the highways infrastructure sector.

Research into driverless technologies within the highways infrastructure sector has received relatively scant academic attention. Hitherto, most advancements made have stemmed from multidisciplinary teams consisting of engineering, information technology and social scientist researchers. There is insufficient supporting evidence of civil engineering and construction academics input into developments made – suggesting that prototype products often fail to adequately consider practical applications in the highways infrastructure sector at the design and use case stage. This view is substantiated by feedback from leading industry experts who participated in unstructured telephone interviews. Their feedback suggests that practical applications of products have been beset with problems, thus creating a perception that advanced technologies are largely “unusable” within the highways infrastructure sector and so are unsuitable for large-scale (and particularly bespoke) industrial applications.

This research critically synthesises the prevailing scientific discourse within extant literature on driverless technologies implemented but also garners practitioner feedback from leading UK industrialists on their applications in practice. Hitherto, this combined analysis approach has been rarely used in spite of it having significant advantages of tacit knowledge reflection on technologies used, where such can be used as a basis for further informed discourse and/or development. Moreover, this work culminates in a conceptual model that acts as a catalyst for future research investigations.

The paper aims to identify the critical constraints that impede heritage building (HB) facility managers from discharging their duties effectively and develop an index model to guide HB maintenance management (HBMM) practitioners to the critical constraints.

A literature review was conducted to identify HBMM constraints. Facilty management practitioners assessed the constraints' significance through an online survey. The factor analysis was used to shortlist and group the constraints, and the constraint clusters were analyzed by the fuzzy synthetic evaluation technique. A significant index cluster to determine HBMM constraints criticality was generated using the linear additive model.

Embracing a total of 16 HBMM constraints, the three clusters identified are: (1) managerial and inadequacy constraints, (2) pressure and bureaucracy constraints and (3) HB peculiarities constraints. Based on the generated significant index, the HB peculiarities cluster was identified as the most significant.

The study was conducted in a particular jurisdiction, limiting the generalizability of the result. Future research should address this limitation by covering more jurisdictions.

The significant index model (SIM) developed enables HBMM practitioners to objectively assess the criticality of HB constraints and facilitates them to effectively strategize and allocate resources for HBMM.

The SIM, which transforms subjective judgment into the objective assessment of the HBMM constraints' criticality, can assist practitioners, policymakers and other HBMM stakeholders in implementing strategies for the sustainability of HBs.

The aim of this study is to explore the influence of personal attributes, namely, gender, age, education and income, on the perception of facilities management (FM) services for residential buildings.

Collected through an interview survey, the personal particulars of the users of a typical residential estate in Hong Kong and their perceived importance and performance levels of five main aspects of FM services were analyzed using the analytic hierarchy process and statistical analyses.

The weighted performance ratings of the services, which are products of interaction between perceived importance and perceived performance, showed perfect rank correlations across user groups with different personal attributes. As for the shares contributed to the services’ overall weighted performance, the largest differences were associated with the security and leisure and landscape aspects rated between the users with tertiary education and those without.

The findings that male adults, users with tertiary education and those with earning capacity tended to give more consistent responses can serve as a reference for determining the target amount of samples in similar surveys in future. Further work is needed to research into how the method of this study may be adapted for use in investigating FM services for other types of buildings or the same type of buildings in other places.

The approach taken in scrutinizing the performance contributions of the services, which helps to identify any improvements needed, can be used to evaluate FM services for similar residential buildings.

The study results provide an understanding of the influence of personal attributes on perception of FM services.

This paper aims to investigate the theoretical and practical links between digital twin (DT) application in heritage facilities management (HFM) from a life cycle management perspective and to signpost the future development directions of DT in HFM.

This state-of-the-art review was conducted using a systematic literature review method. Inclusive and exclusive criteria were identified and used to retrieve relevant literature from renowned literature databases. Shortlisted publications were analysed using the VOSviewer software and then critically reviewed to reveal the status quo of research in the subject area.

The review results show that DT has been mainly adopted to support decision-making on conservation approach and method selection, performance monitoring and prediction, maintenance strategies design and development, and energy evaluation and management. Although many researchers attempted to develop DT models for part of a heritage building at component or system level and test the models using real-life cases, their works were constrained by availability of empirical data. Furthermore, data capture approaches, data acquisition methods and modelling with multi-source data are found to be the existing challenges of DT application in HFM.

In a broader sense, this study contributes to the field of engineering, construction and architectural management by providing an overview of how DT has been applied to support management activities throughout the building life cycle. For the HFM practice, a DT-cum-heritage building information modelling (HBIM) framework was developed to illustrate how DT can be integrated with HBIM to facilitate future DT application in HFM. The overall implication of this study is that it reveals the potential of heritage DT in facilitating HFM in the urban development context.