The coronavirus outbreak has created a global health crisis that has disrupted all industries, including the construction industry. Following the onset of the pandemic, construction workers faced and continue to face unprecedented safety and health challenges. Therefore, construction employers established new safety precautions to protect the health and safety of the workforce and minimize the spread of the virus. The new precautions followed the advice and guidelines offered by different health and safety agencies like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Associated General Contractors of America (AGC). With construction projects resuming operations, it becomes important to analyze the coronavirus-related health and safety concerns of construction workforce and understand how the new safety procedures can assist on jobsites. Existing studies mostly focused on interviews and surveys with construction companies to understand the impact on project performance and supply chains. However, no study has yet to analyze the United States construction workforce. This paper fills the gap by providing a qualitative descriptive analysis of the COVID-19 complaints data gathered by OSHA from construction jobsites. Information gathered by OSHA includes the jobsite location, the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) of the construction company, the type of the complaint (i.e., formal or non-formal), and a thorough description of the complaint. N-grams were employed to analyze the complaints, detect trends, and compile a list of the most frequent concerns reported by the workforce. The analysis of the complaints data identifies safety practices that were most violated, highlights major safety and health concerns for construction workers, and pinpoints geographical areas that have seen a surge in complaints. The study also synthesized the existing research corpus and compiled a list of 100 best practices that construction employers can adopt to mitigate the concerns of the workforce. The findings of this study provide insights into the safety and health trends on construction sites, lay the foundation for future work of academicians and practitioners to address the concerns faced by construction workers, and serve as lessons learned for the industry in the case of any future pandemic.
As the notion of data-driven analytics and turning data into action is becoming more salient in the construction industry, researchers and practitioners have recently devoted considerable effort to investigate the digital transformation of the industry. Along this journey, Digital Twin has been introduced to the industry as a concept that holds the promise to challenge the status-quo and address long standing problems of productivity, efficiency, and value. While this concept is becoming more familiar among practitioners, there is a lack of universal definitions of what the Digital Twin of a construction project is. Additionally, while identifying the purpose of Digital Twin is recognized as the first step in implementing Digital Twins, there is little discussion on the perception of construction practitioners of the extent to which Digital Twin can deliver value. To address these research gaps and building on the existing work on Digital Twins in the context of the construction industry, this paper first proposes a definition of the Digital Twin of a construction project. Next, a series of semi-structured interviews are conducted with nine construction practitioners to understand their perceptions on the use and challenges of Digital Twins. Thematic analysis is then used to analyze interview data and summarize Digital Twins applications, capabilities, and challenges. Forty direct applications were identified and grouped into seven capabilities. Digital Twins capabilities of Increase Transparency of Information and Real-Time Monitoring, Analysis, and Feedback were the most discussed with a total of eight applications each, followed by Better Stakeholder Collaboration which had seven applications. The discussion on challenges led to the identification of 34 challenges to implementing Digital Twin, grouped into six categories coded through thematic analysis. The category on Data Understanding, Preparation, and Usage Challenges was found to be the most critical for the interviewees. Additionally, the paper presents a case study on how building authority can be integrated into Digital Twins and leverage its use throughout the lifecycle of a building. Future work can further investigate the challenges and develop prototypes that can help in quantifying the benefits of implementing Digital Twins on a Construction Project.
This research explores the current state of Construction 4.0 and discusses a four-layer implementation of Construction 4.0 in the industry. The research methodology consists of an extensive literature review to gain insights about Construction 4.0 and frame the four-layer implementation plan. A case study is also presented to showcase the proposed implementation plan. Nine Construction 4.0 technologies were discussed, their integration throughout the project lifecycle was presented in a roadmap, their integration and connectivity with one another were outlined in an interaction roadmap, and the requirements necessary for achieving the 4.0 transformation were articulated. However, the proposed implementation plan is focused on nine Construction 4.0 technologies. The research presents a comprehensive plan for integrating Construction 4.0 technologies into the industry and serves as a guideline to help construction companies better understand the implications of Construction 4.0.
Disruptive technologies offer avenues to significantly improve the performance of construction project delivery. While the construction industry is often labeled as conservative and unimaginative with regard to technology adoption, significant strides have been made in recent yearsspecifically, the use of Building Information Modeling (BIM) for information storage, distribution and communication, as well as Lean construction techniques such as production planning and control (PPC). While the implementation of these innovative technologies and practices individually improve project performance, integrating them together can provide still greater benefits. BIM is certainly useful, but it alone is not a satisfactory answer to the paradox: how does one design and visualize a 3D product in a 2D space? Augmented Reality (AR) is a disruptive technology that can help address this challenge. AR is both an aggregator of information and an information publishing platform which allows users a spectrum of capabilities to 1) passively view displayed information, 2) actively engage and interact with published content, and 3) collaborate with others in real time from remote locations. No extant research effort has comprehensively investigated the opportunities and benefits of the integrated use of AR, BIM, and Lean in the planning process to improve project performance. This paper addresses precisely this research gap. Using insights gained from realworld construction projects, this paper examines the current state of production strategy process (PSP) developmentan integral part of PPC, identifies pain-points and opportunities for process reengineering using AR, and develops an AR-enabled PSP future state.
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