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The purpose of this paper is to report on the results of a study carried out to identify and analyse which potential subject areas may have impact on developments in the field of building maintenance (BM). That is, it is intended to contribute to the integration of new approaches so that building maintenance management (BMM) becomes as automated, digital and intelligent or smartness as possible in the near future.

The research approach has resulted in a theory that is essentially based on a qualitative design. The route followed was a literature review, involving the collection, analysis and interpretation of carefully selected information, mostly from recently published records. The data assembled and the empirical experience itself made it possible to present a comprehensive viewpoint and some future outlooks.

Five thematic areas considered as potentially impactful for BM developments have been highlighted, analysed and generically labelled as thematic base words, which are monitoring, automation, digitalisation, intelligence and smart. It is believed that these may be aspects that will lay the groundwork for a much more advanced and integrated agenda, featured by a high-tech vision.

This is thought to be a different way of looking at the problem, as it addresses five current issues together. Trendy technological aspects are quite innovative and advantageous for BMM, providing opportunities not yet widely explored and boosting the paradigm shift.

Automation facilitates production activities within offsite construction (OSC) projects through computer-controlled and mechanised systems that can be programmed to deliver various products in a self-regulating sequence. Despite known benefits of automation to offsite production, the level of automation adoption in New Zealand is low. This study is an effort to understand the current status of automation within the New Zealand construction industry and to identify the barriers and enablers to its uptake.

This study utilises the qualitative approach of semi-structured interviews (open-ended questions). Using a referral sampling strategy (snowballing), fifteen New Zealand industry experts were interviewed, and the data collected were analysed using qualitative content analysis.

The study found that there is a weak business case for full automation. Four main categories of barriers to the uptake of automated OSC were identified, including requirement of high capital cost, lack of education about automation and OSC and non-existence of regulations to support OSC. It was noted that financial supports to the OSC sub-sector in form of subsidies, tax waivers, and enhanced leasing model could enhance the uptake of automation. Further to this more awareness about OSC's automation and regulations suitable for OSC could enhance the confidence of business owners to invest in this area.

Originality of this paper stems from the fact that, not much attention has been paid to investigating the uptake of automation for OSC sub-sector of construction industry in New Zealand context.

Despite the continuous development of Building Information Modeling (BIM) standards, not all of its dimensions are supported to the same extent. This is the case of Building Automation Systems (BAS) in which the features that are limited mostly to physical setup of devices are supported. These are largely insufficient to support modeling automation scenarios. The purpose of this article is to clarify the gap in the state of the art and define the need for further developments.

This article explores the existing gap in the literature and discusses the hypothesis of extending BIM to a wider support of BA concepts. Based on an assessment of scientific and technical literature, this study elicits the information requirements of BA and performs a gap analysis with current BIM standards, such as Industry Foundation Classes (IFC).

Our findings lead us to conclude that there is a lack of completeness regarding features from BAS automation and management levels. Furthermore, it is shown that IFC is the most adequate data model to cover BAS without losing its purpose, but there is still a considerable work that needs to be addressed in future research.

BIM standards such as IFC position themselves as natural candidates for modeling and exchanging information regarding BA. However, the extent to which BIM supports automation features has never been rigorously analyzed. This article explores the existing gap in the literature and discusses the hypothesis of extending BIM to a wider support of BA concepts. Based on an assessment of scientific and technical literature, this study elicits the information requirements of BA and performs a gap analysis with current BIM standards such as IFC.

Due to the increasing size and complexity of construction projects, construction engineering and management involves the coordination of many complex and dynamic processes and relies on the analysis of uncertain, imprecise and incomplete information, including subjective and linguistically expressed information. Various modelling and computing techniques have been used by construction researchers and applied to practical construction problems in order to overcome these challenges, including fuzzy hybrid techniques. Fuzzy hybrid techniques combine the human-like reasoning capabilities of fuzzy logic with the capabilities of other techniques, such as optimization, machine learning, multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) and simulation, to capitalise on their strengths and overcome their limitations. Based on a review of construction literature, this chapter identifies the most common types of fuzzy hybrid techniques applied to construction problems and reviews selected papers in each category of fuzzy hybrid technique to illustrate their capabilities for addressing construction challenges. Finally, this chapter discusses areas for future development of fuzzy hybrid techniques that will increase their capabilities for solving construction-related problems. The contributions of this chapter are threefold: (1) the limitations of some standard techniques for solving construction problems are discussed, as are the ways that fuzzy methods have been hybridized with these techniques in order to address their limitations; (2) a review of existing applications of fuzzy hybrid techniques in construction is provided in order to illustrate the capabilities of these techniques for solving a variety of construction problems and (3) potential improvements in each category of fuzzy hybrid technique in construction are provided, as areas for future research.

Traditional administration of building services regards them as having confined scope, operating in isolation or tightly coupled and providing minimal support for overall coordination and holistic management hindering the provisioning of advanced services. This approach inherently bears weaknesses related to complex services management, results in increased costs, and formulates rigid architectural design that restricts flexibility and extensibility. Taking into consideration this set of drawbacks, the purpose of this paper is to propose exploiting a service‐oriented architecture that will allow for dynamic, coordinated and distributed building services management.

The paper presents the design of an enterprise‐based networking architecture for building services and systems and specifies its functional components.

The proposed architecture is compliant with established practices in the building automation field and focuses on catering for a wide spectrum of building and enterprise level services. A specific deployment use‐case scenario and its related implementation issues is considered, so as to promote interoperability and adoption of open standards and principles for the system level performance evaluation of the proposed architecture is also examined.

Literature review is not exhaustive and evaluation of the proposed architecture should be performed in a more systematic manner.

Adoption of a service‐oriented view as far as facilities management is concerned.

This paper identifies through a thorough literature review the research problems in the area of building services integration and proposes an approach to enable successful integration. The novelty of this work is based on the application of the state‐of‐the‐art in enterprise networking for integration of building management and IT‐based services.

The meaning of Industry 4.0 has started to be outlined for the construction industry, but there is still limited knowledge on the implications for the single-family wooden house building industry. The purpose of this paper is to expand the understanding of what the fourth industrial revolution implies for the single-family wooden house industry. The paper contributes with practitioners’ view of the content and meaning of a smart single-family wooden house factory.

An exploratory multiple case study was carried out at two Swedish single-family wooden house builders, combined with a traditional literature review.

As a result of a multiple case studies, the content and meaning of a smart single-family wooden house factory was elaborated on. In total, 15 components of a smart single-family wooden house factory were identified, of which 8 corresponded to the components of Industry 4.0 as described in other sectors.

The study can be expanded to also include multi-family wooden house builders and other branches of the offsite wooden building industry.

Managers in the house-building industry who want to improve and strive for a smart single-family wooden house factory can learn from this study, get an insight of what other companies consider as important and how it relates to Industry 4.0.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is a first attempt to understand what Industry 4.0 mean and how it can be accomplished for the single-family wooden house offsite manufacturing industry.

This paper aims to highlight the expanding link between facility management (FM) and building automation and control systems (BACS) through a review of literature. It examines the opportunities and challenges of BACS for facility managers and proposes solutions for mitigating the risks associated with BACS implementation.

This paper reviews various research papers to explore the positive influences of BACS on FM, such as support with strategic decision-making, predictive maintenance, energy efficiency and comfort improvement. It also discusses the challenges of BACS, including obsolescence, interoperability, vendor lock-in, reliability and security risks and suggests potential solutions based on existing literature.

BACS offers numerous opportunities for facility managers, such as improved decision-making, energy efficiency and comfort levels in office buildings. However, there are also risks associated with BACS implementation, including obsolescence, interoperability, vendor lock-in, reliability and security risks. These risks can be mitigated through measures such as hardware and software obsolescence management plans, functional requirement lists, wireless communication protocols, advanced feedback systems and increased awareness about BACS security.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no prior academic research has been conducted on the expanding link between FM and BACS. Although some papers have touched upon the opportunities and challenges of BACS for FM, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of these findings by consolidating existing literature.

The paper aims to leverage the importance of the integrated automatic structural design for tall buildings at the early stage. It proposes to use an automatic prototype to perform the structural design, analysis and optimisation in a building information modelling (BIM)-based platform. This process starts with extracting the required information from the architectural model in Revit Autodesk, such as boundary conditions and designs different options of the structural models in Robot Autodesk. In this process, Dynamo for Revit is used to define the mathematical functions to use different variables and generate various structural models. The paper aims to expand the domain of automation in the BIM platform to reduce the iterative process in different areas such as conceptual structural design and collaboration between architects and structural engineers to reduce the time and cost at the early stages.

The paper begins with an exploratory research by adopting a qualitative methodology and using open-ended questions to achieve more information about the phenomenon of automation and interoperability between structural engineers and architects and gain new insight into this area. Furthermore, correlation research is used by adopting quantitative and short questions to compare the proposed prototype with the traditional process of the structural design and optimisation and the interoperability between architects and engineers and consequently, validate the research.

As an outcome of the research, a structural design optimisation (SDO) prototype was developed to semi-automate the structural design process of tall buildings at the early stages. Moreover, the proposed prototype can be used during the early stage of structural design in different areas such as residential buildings, bridges, truss, reinforced concrete detailing, etc. Moreover, comprehensive literature regarding using automation in structural design, optimisation process and interoperability between architects and engineers is conducted that provides a new insight to contribute to future research and development.

Due to the time limit, the paper results may lack in a comprehensive automatic structural design process. Therefore, the researchers are encouraged to expand the workability of the prototype for a comprehensive automatic design check such as automatic design for the minimum deflection, displacement of different types of buildings.

The prototype includes implications for the development of different automatic designs.

The focus of this paper is the optimisation of the structural design in the BIM platform by using automation. This combination is one of the novelties of this paper, and the existing literature has a very limited amount of information and similar work in this area, especially interoperability between architects and engineers.

Intelligent building (IB) is the future of our building industry. All new commercial buildings and probably luxurious domestic buildings are designed with a common goal – to become intelligent buildings. However, the official definition of IB has not yet been standardised around the world. In the USA, an IB is categorised by four basic elements, namely building structure, building systems, building services and building management. In Europe, the emphasis is on information technology and the genuine need of the user. In Singapore and China, it appears that the term “automation” has been dominating with a great emphasis on high technology. It is our view that a proper definition of IB should be based on users’ needs instead of the image of the building itself. We have therefore developed a new method for defining and specifying IBs. The requirements of users are categorised into eight key modules. All building systems and features are summarised in terms of tens of elements. Selected elements are assigned to a particular key area, i.e. module. Each type of building is then allocated certain key areas for detailed design. Once the areas have been chosen, the elements will automatically be assigned for the consultants to carry out detailed design works. This concept of definition has both advantages of comprehensiveness and flexibility, hoping that it will be useful for the developments of IBs not merely in Asia but also the whole world.

The purpose of this paper is to summarize the current applications of BIM, the integration of related technologies and the tendencies and challenges systematically.

Using quantitative and qualitative bibliometric statistical methods, the current mode of interaction between BIM and other related technologies is summarized.

This paper identified 24 different BIM applications in the life cycle. From two perspectives, the implementation status of BIM applications and integrated technologies are respectively studied. The future industry development framework is drawn comprehensively. We summarized the challenges of BIM applications from the perspectives of management, technology and promotion, and confirmed that most of the challenges come from the two driving factors of promotion and management.

The technical challenges reviewed in this paper are from the collected literature we have extracted, which is only a part of the practical challenges and not comprehensive enough.

We summarized the current mode of interactive use of BIM and sorted out the challenges faced by BIM applications to provide reference for the risks and challenges faced by the future industry.

There is little literature to integrate BIM applications and to establish BIM related challenges and risk frameworks. In this paper, we provide a review of the current implementation level of BIM and the risks and challenges of stakeholders through three aspects of management, technology and promotion.