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The future construction site will be pervasive, context aware and embedded with intelligence. The purpose of this paper is to explore and define the concept of the digital skin of the future smart construction site.

The paper provides a systematic and hierarchical classification of 114 articles from both industry and academia on the digital skin concept and evaluates them. The hierarchical classification is based on application areas relevant to construction, such as augmented reality, building information model-based visualisation, labour tracking, supply chain tracking, safety management, mobile equipment tracking and schedule and progress monitoring. Evaluations of the research papers were conducted based on three pillars: validation of technological feasibility, onsite application and user acceptance testing.

Technologies learned about in the literature review enabled the envisaging of the pervasive construction site of the future. The paper presents scenarios for the future context-aware construction site, including the construction worker, construction procurement management and future real-time safety management systems.

Based on the gaps identified by the review in the body of knowledge and on a broader analysis of technology diffusion, the paper highlights the research challenges to be overcome in the advent of digital skin. The paper recommends that researchers follow a coherent process for smart technology design, development and implementation in order to achieve this vision for the construction industry.

In the continuous development of high-speed railways, ensuring the safety of the operation control system is crucial. Electromagnetic interference (EMI) faults in signaling equipment may cause transportation interruptions, delays and even threaten the safety of train operations. Exploring the impact of disturbances on signaling equipment and establishing evaluation methods for the correlation between EMI and safety is urgently needed.

This paper elaborates on the necessity and significance of studying the impact of EMI as an unavoidable and widespread risk factor in the external environment of high-speed railway operations and continuous development. The current status of research methods and achievements from the perspectives of standard systems, reliability analysis and safety assessment are examined layer by layer. Additionally, it provides prospects for innovative ideas for exploring the quantitative correlation between EMI and signaling safety.

Despite certain innovative achievements in both domestic and international standard systems and related research for ensuring and evaluating railway signaling safety, there’s a lack of quantitative and strategic research on the degradation of safety performance in signaling equipment due to EMI. A quantitative correlation between EMI and safety has yet to be established. On this basis, this paper proposes considerations for research methods pertaining to the correlation between EMI and safety.

This paper overviews a series of methods and outcomes derived from domestic and international studies regarding railway signaling safety, encompassing standard systems, reliability analysis and safety assessment. Recognizing the necessity for quantitatively describing and predicting the impact of EMI on high-speed railway signaling safety, an innovative approach using risk assessment techniques as a bridge to establish the correlation between EMI and signaling safety is proposed.

This study aims to propose a safety marketing stimuli-response model to explain passengers’ safety behavior in the ferry services context.

Structural equation modeling was conducted to examine the impact of safety marketing stimuli on passengers’ safety awareness and behavior by using data obtained from a survey of 316 ferry passengers in Hong Kong.

The authors found that passengers’ perceptions of ferry safety marketing stimuli positively affected their safety awareness and safety awareness positively affected passengers’ safety behaviors. Specifically, they found that safety awareness played a mediating role in the relationship between ferry safety marketing stimuli and passengers’ safety behaviors.

The empirically validated scales can be adapted to practices of safety marketing, while providing helpful information for ferry operators to evaluate their efforts of safety marketing and implications for improvement.

According to the authors' knowledge, this study is one of the first attempts to fill this research gap by empirically validating and theoretically conceptualizing measures of safety marketing stimuli based on the marketing stimulus-response model.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a system dynamic simulated process model for maintenance work management incorporating the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) technologies.

The extant literature in physical assets maintenance depicts that poor maintenance management is predominantly because of a lack of a clearly defined maintenance work management process model, resulting in poor management of maintenance work. This paper solves this complex phenomenon using a combination of conceptual process modeling and system dynamics simulation incorporating 4IR technologies. A process for maintenance work management and its control actions on scheduled maintenance tasks versus unscheduled maintenance tasks is modeled, replicating real-world scenarios with a digital lens (4IR technologies) for predictive maintenance strategy.

A process for maintenance work management is thus modeled and simulated as a dynamic system. Post-model validation, this study reveals that the real-world maintenance work management process can be replicated using system dynamics modeling. The impact analysis of 4IR technologies on maintenance work management systems reveals that the implementation of 4IR technologies intensifies asset performance with an overall gain of 27.46%, yielding the best maintenance index. This study further reveals that the benefits of 4IR technologies positively impact equipment defect predictability before failure, thereby yielding a predictive maintenance strategy.

The study focused on maintenance work management system without the consideration of other subsystems such as cost of maintenance, production dynamics, and supply chain management.

The maintenance real-world quantitative data is retrieved from two maintenance departments from company A, for a period of 24 months, representing years 2017 and 2018. The maintenance quantitative data retrieved represent six various types of equipment used at underground Mines. The maintenance management qualitative data (Organizational documents) in maintenance management are retrieved from company A and company B. Company A is a global mining industry, and company B is a global manufacturing industry. The reliability of the data used in the model validation have practical implications on how maintenance work management system behaves with the benefit of 4IR technologies' implementation.

This research study yields an overall benefit in asset management, thereby intensifying asset performance. The expected learnings are intended to benefit future research in the physical asset management field of study and most important to the industry practitioners in physical asset management.

This paper provides for a model in which maintenance work and its dynamics is systematically managed. Uncontrollable corrective maintenance work increases the complexity of the overall maintenance work management. The use of a system dynamic model and simulation incorporating 4IR technologies adds value on the maintenance work management effectiveness.

At the US passenger stations, train operations approaching terminating tracks rely on the engineer’s compliant behavior to safely stop before the end of the tracks. Noncompliance actions from the disengaged or inattentive engineers would result in hazards to train passengers, train crewmembers and bystanders at passenger stations. Over the past decade, a series of end-of-track collisions occurred at passenger stations with substantial property damage and casualties. This study’s developed systemic model and discussions present policymakers, railway practitioners and academic researchers with a flexible approach for qualitatively assessing railroad safety.

To achieve a system-based, micro-level analysis of end-of-track accidents and eventually promote the safety level of passenger stations, the systems-theoretic accident modeling and processes (STAMP), as a practical systematic accident model widely used in the complex systems, is developed in view of environmental factors, human errors, organizational factors and mechanical failures in this complex socio-technical system.

The developed STAMP accident model and analytical results qualitatively provide an explicit understanding of the system hazards, constraints and hierarchical control structure of train operations on terminating tracks in the US passenger stations. Furthermore, the safety recommendations and practical options related to obstructive sleep apnea screening, positive train control-based collision avoidance mechanisms, robust system safety program plans and bumping posts are proposed and evaluated using the STAMP approach.

The findings from STAMP-based analysis can serve as valid references for policymakers, government accident investigators, railway practitioners and academic researchers. Ultimately, they can contribute to establishing effective emergent measures for train operations at passenger stations and promote the level of safety necessary to protect the public. The STAMP approach could be adapted to analyze various other rail safety systems that aim to ultimately improve the safety level of railroad systems.

In the context of the Industry 4.0, this paper aims to investigate the state of the art of Italian manufacturing, focusing the attention on the implementation of intelligent predictive maintenance (IPdM) and 4.0 key enabling technologies (KETs), analyzing advantages and limitations encountered by companies.

A survey has been developed by the University of Parma in cooperation with the Italian Workers' Compensation Authority (INAIL) and was submitted to a sample of Italian companies. Overall, 70 answers were collected and analyzed.

Results show that the 54% of companies implemented smart technologies, increasing quality and safety, reducing the operating costs and sometimes improving the process' sustainability. However, IPdM was implemented only by the 37% of respondents: thanks to big data collection and analytics, Internet of Things, machine learning and collaborative robots, they reduced downtime and maintenance costs. These changes were implemented mainly by large companies, located in northern Italy. To spread the use of IPdM in Italian manufacturing, the high initial investment, lack of skilled labor and difficulties in the integration of new digital technologies with the existing infrastructure are the main obstacles to overcome.

The article gives an overview on the current state of the art of 4.0 technologies implementation in Italy: it is useful not only for companies that want to discover the implementations' advantages but also for institutions or research centres that could help them to solve the encountered obstacles.

Poor maintenance management leads to non-negligible economic, environmental and social impacts and obstacles to the sustainable manufacturing paradigm. Studies evaluating maintenance impacts on sustainability underline growing interest in the topic, but reports on the industrial field are lacking. Therefore, this paper investigates the industrial environment and the indicators that manufacturing companies use for measuring their maintenance impacts.

In this pilot survey study, several stakeholders of production enterprises in the south of Italy were interviewed to unveil the spread of the measurement of maintenance impacts on sustainability and the indicators used by those companies.

The interview results showed a low level of awareness among stakeholders about maintenance impacts on sustainability. Maintenance stakeholders are mainly focused on technical and economic factors, whereas environmental, quality and safety stakeholders are becoming more aware of maintenance impacts on environmental and social factors. However, both groups need guidelines to define sustainability indicators to assess such impacts.

This exploratory study allowed us to investigate the current situation in industrial organisations and achieve the first variegated and diversified vision of the awareness of company stakeholders on maintenance impacts on the sustainability of several business functions. This paper provides a valuable contribution to “maintenance and sustainability” research area in production contexts and sheds light on non-negligible maintenance impacts on sustainability, providing preliminary insights on the topic and an effective basis for defining future research opportunities. Moreover, this study enables increased awareness among internal and external manufacturing company stakeholders on the role of maintenance in sustainable production.