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This study aims to explore DroneSim, a virtual reality (VR)-based flight training simulator, as an alternative for real-world drone-mediated building inspection training.

Construction, engineering and management students were asked to pilot drones in the VR-based DroneSim space and perform common flight operations and inspection tasks within the spatiotemporal context of a building construction project. Another student group was also recruited and asked to perform a similar building inspection task in real world. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)–Task Load Index (TLX) survey was used to assess students’ inflight workload demand under both Real and DroneSim conditions. Post-assessment questionnaires were also used to analyze students’ feedback regarding the usability and presence of DroneSim for drone building inspection training.

None of the NASA–TLX task load levels under Real and DroneSim conditions were highly rated by students, and both groups experienced comparable drone-building inspection training. Students perceived DroneSim positively and found the VR experience stimulating.

This study’s contribution is twofold: to better understand the development stages involved in the design of a VR-based drone flight training simulator, specifically for building inspection tasks; and to improve construction students’ drone operational and flight training skills by offering them the opportunity to enhance their drone navigation skills in a risk-free, repeatable yet realistic environment. Such contributions ultimately pave the way for better integration of drone-mediated building inspection training in construction education while meeting industry needs.

The architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry exists in a dynamic environment and requires several stakeholders to communicate regularly. However, evidence indicates current communication practices fail to meet the requirements of increasingly complex projects. With the advent of Industry 4.0, a trend is noted to create a digital communication environment between stakeholders. Identified as a central technology in Industry 4.0, virtual reality (VR) has the potential to supplement current communication and facilitate the digitization of the AEC industry. This paper aims to explore how VR has been applied and future research directions for communication purpose.

This research follows a systematic literature assessment methodology to summarize the results of 41 research articles in the last 15 years and outlines the applications of VR in facilitating communication in the AEC domain.

Relevant VR applications are mainly found in building inspection, facility management, safety training, construction education and design and review. Communication tools and affordance are provided or built in several forms: text-based tools, voice chat tool, visual sharing affordance and avatars. Objective and subjective communication assessments are observed from those publications.

This review contributes to identifying the recent employment areas and future research directions of VR to facilitate communication in the AEC domain. The outcome can be a practical resource to guide both industry professionals and researchers to recognize the potentials of VR and will ultimately facilitate the creation of digital construction environments.

Remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) systems have emerged as an established tool within the construction industry. Concurrent with this trend has been the rise in research on RPA, establishing this as a new field of study within the construction management domain. What is needed now is an assessment of the current state of research in this emerging discipline – its strengths and weaknesses – by which future research on RPA in construction may be guided. The purpose of this paper is to address this need.

A total of 59 peer-reviewed journal articles covering RPAs within the construction domain were systematically reviewed using a mixed-methods approach, utilizing qualitative-scientometric analyses techniques.

The results reveal a field of study in its fledgling stage, with a limited number of experts operating somewhat in isolation, from a limited number of institutions. Key publication outlets are identified, with the main focus of research being in the technical areas of remote sensing, photogrammetry and image processing.

The study benefits researchers and industry practitioners alike. For researchers, the identified gaps reveal areas of high priority in future research. For construction companies, particularly small to medium-sized businesses, the study raises awareness of the latest developments and potential applicability of RPAs in the industry.

The study exposes what is missing from current research: a broader consideration of organizational adjustments needed to accommodate RPA usage, economic analyses and impediments to wider acceptance.

The purpose of this research is to explore how to visually represent human decision-making processes during the performance of indoor building inspection flight operations using drones.

Data from expert pilots were collected using a virtual reality drone flight simulator. The expert pilot data were studied to inform the development of an interactive 2D representation of drone flight spatial and temporal data – InDrone. Within the InDrone platform, expert pilot data were visually encoded to characterize key pilot behaviors in terms of pilots' approaches to view and difficulties encountered while detecting the inspection markers. The InDrone platform was evaluated using a user-center experimental methodology focusing on two metrics: (1) how novice pilots understood the flight approaches and difficulties contained within InDrone and (2) the perceived usability of the InDrone platform.

The results of the study indicated that novice pilots recognized inspection markers and difficult-to-inspect building areas in 63% (STD = 48%) and 75% (STD = 35%) of the time on average, respectively. Overall, the usability of InDrone presented high scores as demonstrated by the novice pilots during the flight pattern recognition tasks with a mean score of 77% (STD = 15%).

This research contributes to the definition of visual affordances that support the communication of human decision-making during drone indoor building inspection flight operations. The developed InDrone platform highlights the necessity of defining visual affordances to explore drone flight spatial and temporal data for indoor building inspections.

Over the past decade, researchers have used unmanned aerial systems (UASs) in construction industry for various applications from site inspection to safety monitoring or building maintenance. This paper aims to assort academic studies on construction UAS applications, summarize logics behind using UAS in each application and extend understanding of current state of UAS research in the construction setting.

This research follows a systematic literature assessment methodology to summarize the results of 54 research papers over the past ten years and outlines the research trends for applying UASs in construction.

UASs are used in building inspection, damage assessment, site surveying, safety inspection, progress monitoring, building maintenance and other construction applications. Cost saving, time efficiency and improved accessibility are the primary reasons for choosing UAS in construction applications. Rotary-wing UASs are the most common types of UASs being used in construction. Cameras, LiDAR and Kinect are the most common onboard sensors integrated in construction UAS applications. The control styles used are manual, semi-autonomous and autonomous.

This paper contributes to classification of UAS applications in construction research and identification of UAS hardware and sensor types as well as their flying control systems in construction literature.

Three dimensional (3 D) laser scanner surveying is widely used in many fields, such as agriculture, mining and heritage documentation and can be of great benefit for as-built documentation in construction and facility management domains. However, there is lack of applied research and use cases integrating 3 D laser scanner surveying with building information modeling (BIM) for existing facilities in Malaysia. This study aims to develop a scan to as-built BIM workflow to use 3 D laser scanner surveying and create as-built building information models of an existing complex facility in Malaysia.

A case study approach was followed to develop a scan to as-built BIM workflow through four main steps: 3 D laser scanning, data preprocessing, data registration and building information modeling.

This case study proposes a comprehensive scan to as-built BIM workflow which illustrates all the required steps to create a precise 3 D as-built building information model from scans. This workflow was successfully implemented to the Eco-Home facility at the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.

Scan to as-built BIM is a digital alternative to manual and tedious process of documentation of as-built condition of a facility and provides a detail process using laser scans to create as-built building information models of facilities.

Healthcare facility managers work in complex and dynamic environments where critical decisions are constantly made. Providing them with enhanced decision support systems would result in a positive impact on the productivity and success of the projects they undertake, as well as the sustainability of critical healthcare infrastructure. The purpose of this paper is to propose a conceptual ambient intelligent environment for enhancing the decision-making process of the facility managers. This low-cost data-rich environment would use building information modeling (BIM) and mobile augmented reality (MAR) as technological bases for the natural human-computer interfaces and aerial drones as technological tools.

This paper presents a scenario for the integration of augmented reality (AR) and building information modeling (BIM) to build an ambient intelligent (AmI) environment for facility managers where mobile, natural, user interfaces would provide the users with required data to facilitate their critical decision-making process. The technological requirements for having such an intelligent environment are also discussed.

The proposed BIM-MAR-based approach is capable of enhancing maintenance related practices for facility managers who are mobile to integrate with their facilities' intelligent environment. This approach is also capable of providing a collaborative environment in which different stakeholders, across geographically distributed areas, could work together to solve facility management tasks.

In this paper ambient intelligence will be considered for the first time in the area of healthcare facility management practices to provide facility managers with an intelligent BIM-based environment to access facility information and consequently enhance their decision-making process.

With the facility management industry increasingly adopting building information modeling (BIM) technologies, there is a need to investigate where this industry stands in its application. Moreover, studies on efficient and cost-effective solutions to integrate BIM and mobile augmented reality (MAR) present an environment where facility managers can experience an intuitive natural interaction with their mobile interfaces to efficiently access needed information. The industry’s view on this new approach of accessing information from BIM models should also be investigated, and its feedback should be considered for future phases of this avenue of research.

This paper explores not only how BIM can be beneficial to facility management practitioners, but also how its integration with MAR and making the data accessible through handheld mobile devices can enhance current facility management practices. An online survey was conducted to assess professional facility managers’ characteristics, technology use and working environment as well as the current status of BIM application in their practices. An online video scenario has also been used to illustrate to facility managers how an ideal BIM-MAR-integrated environment could provide them with mobile access to their required information. Facility managers’ feedback on usability, applicability and challenges of such environment has also been investigated through a follow-up survey.

With this paper, industry practitioners as well as academic researchers will be able to understand the current status of BIM and mobile computing application in facility management along with the benefits and challenges of implementing these technologies in an augmented reality (AR) environment.

Understanding facility managers’ requirements, characteristics and the way they do their tasks would be of great value for development of tools or systems that would facilitate their practices.

The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a study aimed at investigating the information requirements for broad use mobile applications for construction projects. It also presents the results of usability testing of a mobile application prototype for improving information management in construction projects.

To achieve the research objectives, the information required to properly design the mobile application was collected by distributing an online questionnaire among construction professionals. Then a server‐based application prototype was developed based on enterprise content management concepts. The mobile application was tested in a laboratory by setting a group of construction management postgraduate students who had experience of working in the construction industry.

This study determines and ranks the critical on‐site information artifacts, considered highly important from the perspective of clients, consultants, and contractors. The study also illustrates the development of a mobile application prototype and results of a usability test. The test results demonstrate that the application is well designed, user friendly, and meets user requirements.

The results of this study are useful for developing a functional mobile application to manage on‐site information in construction projects.

The paper makes an original contribution by investigating information requirements of a mobile application for on‐site information management.

Construction is a risky industry. Therefore, organizations are seeking ways towards improving their safety performance. Among these, the integration of technology into health and safety leads to enhanced safety performance. Considering the benefits observed in using technology in safety, this study aims to explore digital technologies' use and potential benefits in construction health and safety.

An extensive bibliometrics analysis was conducted to reveal which technologies are at the forefront of others and how these technologies are used in safety operations. The study used two different databases, Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus, to scan the literature in a systemic way.

The systemic analysis of several studies showed that the digital technologies use in construction are still a niche theme and need more assessment. The study provided that sensors and wireless technology are of utmost importance in terms of construction safety. Moreover, the study revealed that artificial intelligence, machine learning, building information modeling (BIM), sensors and wireless technologies are trending technologies compared to unmanned aerial vehicles, serious games and the Internet of things. On the other hand, the study provided that the technologies are even more effective with integrated use like in the case of BIM and sensors or unmanned aerial vehicles. It was observed that the use of these technologies varies with respect to studies conducted in different countries. The study further revealed that the studies conducted on this topic are mostly published in some selected journals and international collaboration efforts in terms of researching the topic have been observed.

This study provides an extensive analysis of WoS and Scopus databases and an in-depth review of the use of digital technologies in construction safety. The review consists of the most recent studies showing the benefits of using such technologies and showing the usage on a systemic level from which both scientists and practitioners can benefit to devise new strategies in technology usage.