The Fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0) is reshaping the construction industry and bringing it into an intelligent construction era. Emerging technologies, such as the Building Information Modelling, Internet of Things, big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence, have penetrated into all stages of the building life cycle and play a significant role. However, the major issue of intelligent construction is integrating multiple technologies to create more potential opportunities rather than their fragmented application. Considering the various special characteristics of the construction industry and the high heterogeneity of these technologies, their integration in the construction industry is challenging and requires in-depth investigations. This paper summarizes the Industry 4.0-related technologies involved in the construction industry based on an analysis of the characteristics of the industry. Further, this study presents a framework of a cyber-physical system to integrate these technologies and improve the overall capabilities of construction organization and management. A case study of the Xiong'an citizen service center is introduced to verify the technological feasibility and preliminary implementation effect of the proposed framework. As forward-looking research, the significance of this paper may also to inspire more efforts in this field.

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PurposeThe existing literature has been mainly focused on local problems but without an overall framework for studying the top-level planning of intelligent construction from a systematic perspective. The purpose of this paper is to fill this gap.Design/methodology/approachThis research adopts a deductive research approach.FindingsThis research proposes a reference architecture and related business scenario framework for intelligent construction based on the existing theory and industrial practice.Originality/valueThe main contribution of this research is to provide a useful reference to the Chinese government and industry for formulating digital transformation strategies, as well as suggests meaningful future research directions in the construction industry.

Model tests were carried out in dry silica sand under pile loading and visualizing observation to investigate the behavior of a pile group. The pile group consisted of nine cylindrical model piles of 40 mm in diameter in most tests or three rectangular parallelepiped model piles in the visualizing observation. Pile spacings of 200 mm and 100 mm between pile centers were used in the models. Tactile sensors were installed to measure the pressure distribution in the ground and colored sand layer with particle image velocimetry (PIV) analysis to reveal the ground deformation in addition to strain gauges inside the model piles to investigate the interaction among group piles. The tests results showed that a narrower spacing between piles resulted in a wider affected area of the ground and the interaction was more significant below the tips.

China is in a development period of urbanization construction, while its environment is threatened by an increasing amount of construction and demolition (C&D) waste. Due to the excessive pursuit of profits and a general lack of environmental awareness of stakeholders, illegal behaviors such as illegal dumping universally exist in the waste disposal process. Meanwhile, supervision departments face many challenges in collaborative management and decision-making, which lead to inefficiencies in C&D waste supervision and management in China. To address the above challenges, we propose an informatization scheme integrating multiple technologies, which will contribute to real-time monitoring of illegal behaviors in the waste disposal process, accurate data collection for evaluating the performance of stakeholders, and the enhancement of the collaboration between supervisory departments. A case study of the Ningbo Construction Waste Transportation Supervision System is introduced to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed scheme; results show that the total number of illegal cases has decreased from 510 to 89 per year since the system was put into operation.

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