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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.

Studies showed that construction digitalisation could prevent or mitigate accidents rate on sites. Digitalisation applications may prevent or mitigate building project collapse (BPC) but with some encumbrances, especially in developing countries. There is a paucity of research on digital technologies application to prevent or mitigate BPC in Nigeria. Thus, the research aims to explore the perceived barriers that may hinder digital technologies from preventing or mitigating building collapse and recommend measures to improve technology applications during development.

The study is exploratory because of the unexplored approach. The researchers collected data from knowledgeable participants in digitalisation and building collapse in Nigeria. The research employed a phenomenology approach and analysed collected data via a thematic approach. The study achieved saturation at the 29th interviewee.

Findings show that lax construction digitalisation implementation, absence of regulatory framework, lax policy, unsafe fieldworkers' behaviours, absence of basic infrastructure, government attitude, hesitation to implement and high technology budget, especially in developing countries, are threats to curbing building collapse menace via digitalisation. The study identified technologies relevant to preventing or mitigating building collapse. Also, it proffered measures to prevent or mitigate building collapse via improved digital technology applications during development.

This research contributes to the construction digitalisation literature, especially in developing countries, and investigates the perceived barriers that may hinder digital technologies usage in preventing or mitigating building collapse in Nigeria.

The proliferation of mobile phones with integrated sensors makes large scale sensing possible at low cost. During mobile sensing, data mostly contain sensitive information of users such as their real-time location. When such information are not effectively secured, users’ privacy can be violated due to eavesdropping and information disclosure. In this paper, we demonstrated the possibility of unauthorized access to location information of a user during sensing due to the ineffective security mechanisms in most sensing applications. We analyzed 40 apps downloaded from Google Play Store and results showed a 100% success rate in traffic interception and disclosure of sensitive information of users. As a countermeasure, a security scheme which ensures encryption and authentication of sensed data using Advanced Encryption Standard 256-Galois Counter Mode was proposed. End-to-end security of location and motion data from smartphone sensors are ensured using the proposed security scheme. Security analysis of the proposed scheme showed it to be effective in protecting Android based sensor data against eavesdropping, information disclosure and data modification.

For the purpose of reducing the incidence of hazardous materials transport accident, eliminating the potential threats and ensuring their safety, aiming at the shortcomings in the process of current hazardous materials transportation management, this paper aims to construct the framework of hazardous materials transportation safety management system under the vehicle-infrastructure connected environment.

The system takes the intelligent connected vehicle as the main supporter, integrating GIS, GPS, eye location, GSM, networks and database technology.

By analyzing the transportation characteristics of hazardous materials, this system consists of five subsystems, which are vehicle and driver management subsystem, dangerous sources and hazardous materials management subsystem, route analysis and optimization subsystem, early warning and emergency rescue management subsystem, and basic information query subsystem.

Hazardous materials transportation safety management system includes omnibearing real-time monitoring, timely updating of system database, real-time generation and optimization of emergency rescue route. The system can reduce the transportation cost and improve the ability of accident prevention and emergency rescue of hazardous materials.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a concept of cloud auction robot (CAR) and its execution platform for transforming perishable food supply chain management. A new paradigm of goods-to-person auction execution model is proposed based on CARs. This paradigm can shift the management of traditional manual working to automated execution with great space and time saving. A scalable CAR-enabled execution system (CARES) is presented to manage logistics workflows, tasks and behavior of CAR-Agents in handling the real-time events and associated data.

An Internet of Things enabled auction environment is designed. The robot is used to pick up and deliver the auction products and commends are given to the robot in real-time. CARES architecture is proposed while integrating three core services from auction workflow management, auction task management, to auction execution control. A system prototype was developed to show its execution through physical emulations and experiments.

The CARES could well schedule the tasks for each robot to minimize their waiting time. The total execution time is reduced by 33 percent on average. Space utilization for each auction studio is improved by about 50 percent per day.

The CAR-enabled execution model and system is simulated and verified in a ubiquitous auction environment so as to upgrade the perishable food supply chain management into a new level which is automated and real-time. The proposed system is flexible to cope with different auction scenarios, such as different auction mechanisms and processes, with high reconfigurability and scalability.

In the domain of healthcare, both process efficiency and the quality of care can be improved through the use of dedicated pervasive technologies. Among these applications are so-called real-time location systems (RTLS). Such systems are designed to determine and monitor the location of assets and people in real time through the use of wireless sensor networks. Numerous commercially available RTLS are used in hospital settings. The nursing home is a relatively unexplored context for the application of RTLS and offers opportunities and challenges for future applications. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper sets out to provide an overview of general applications and technologies of RTLS. Thereafter, it describes the specific healthcare applications of RTLS, including asset tracking, patient tracking and personnel tracking. These overviews are followed by a forecast of the implementation of RTLS in nursing homes in terms of opportunities and challenges.

By comparing the nursing home to the hospital, the RTLS applications for the nursing home context that are most promising are asset tracking of expensive goods owned by the nursing home in order to facilitate workflow and maximise financial resources, and asset tracking of personal belongings that may get lost due to dementia.

This paper is the first to provide an overview of potential application of RTLS technologies for nursing homes. The paper described a number of potential problem areas that can be addressed by RTLS.

The purpose of this research is to develop a generic framework of a digital twin (DT)-based automated construction progress monitoring through reality capture to extended reality (RC-to-XR).

IDEF0 data modeling method has been designed to establish an integration of reality capturing technologies by using BIM, DTs and XR for automated construction progress monitoring. Structural equation modeling (SEM) method has been used to test the proposed hypotheses and develop the skill model to examine the reliability, validity and contribution of the framework to understand the DRX model's effectiveness if implemented in real practice.

The research findings validate the positive impact and importance of utilizing technology integration in a logical framework such as DRX, which provides trustable, real-time, transparent and digital construction progress monitoring.

DRX system captures accurate, real-time and comprehensive data at construction stage, analyses data and information precisely and quickly, visualizes information and reports in a real scale environment, facilitates information flows and communication, learns from itself, historical data and accessible online data to predict future actions, provides semantic and digitalize construction information with analytical capabilities and optimizes decision-making process.

The research presents a framework of an automated construction progress monitoring system that integrates BIM, various reality capturing technologies, DT and XR technologies (VR, AR and MR), arraying the steps on how these technologies work collaboratively to create, capture, generate, analyze, manage and visualize construction progress data, information and reports.

Digital twin (DT) is an emerging technology that enables sophisticated interaction between physical objects and their virtual replicas. Although DT has recently gained significant attraction in both industry and academia, there is no systematic understanding of DT from its development history to its different concepts and applications in disparate disciplines. The majority of DT literature focuses on the conceptual development of DT frameworks for a specific implementation area. Hence, this paper provides a state-of-the-art review of DT history, different definitions and models, and six types of key enabling technologies. The review also provides a comprehensive survey of DT applications from two perspectives: (1) applications in four product-lifecycle phases, i.e. product design, manufacturing, operation and maintenance, and recycling and (2) applications in four categorized engineering fields, including aerospace engineering, tunneling and underground engineering, wind engineering and Internet of things (IoT) applications. DT frameworks, characteristic components, key technologies and specific applications are extracted for each DT category in this paper. A comprehensive survey of the DT references reveals the following findings: (1) The majority of existing DT models only involve one-way data transfer from physical entities to virtual models and (2) There is a lack of consideration of the environmental coupling, which results in the inaccurate representation of the virtual components in existing DT models. Thus, this paper highlights the role of environmental factor in DT enabling technologies and in categorized engineering applications. In addition, the review discusses the key challenges and provides future work for constructing DTs of complex engineering systems.

This paper aims to analyze the application of remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) for remote oil spill sensing.

This paper is an analysis of RPA strong points.

To increase the accuracy and eliminate potentially false contamination detection, which can be caused by external factors, an oil thickness measurement algorithm is used with the help of the multispectral imaging that provides high accuracy and is versatile for any areas of water and various meteorological and atmospheric conditions.

SWOT analysis of implementation of RPA for remote sensing of oil spills.

The use of RPA will improve the remote sensing of oil spills.

The concept of oil spills monitoring needs to be developed for quality data collection, oil pollution control and emergency response.

The research covers the development of a method and design of a device intended for taking samples and determining the presence of oil contamination in an aquatorium area; the procedure includes taking a sample from the water surface, preparing it for transportation and delivering the sample to a designated location by using the RPA. The objective is to carry out the analysis of remote oil spill sensing using RPA. The RPA provides a reliable sensing of oil pollution with significant advantages over other existing methods. The objective is to analyze the use of RPA employing all of their strong points. In this paper, technical aspects of sensors are analyzed, as well as their advantages and limitations.