The purpose of this article is to provide a brief review of methods and techniques developed for the most commonly studied decision-making problems in project planning and control over the last decade. These problems involve project representation, project scheduling, resource allocation, risk analysis, time and cost performance evaluation, time, cost, and cash flow forecasting, optimal timing of control points, and corrective action decision-making. We also review recent tools developed for project planning and control. The emphasis is on recent contributions, but several older yet important works are also cited. Our analysis shows an increasing attention to the stochastic nature of projects in planning and control decision and processes. Recent attention has also been put at improvements in existing project control techniques as well as developing new methods to automate data collection, process, and generate more integrated project plan. More importantly, our review highlights an important shift in the project planning and control research field, which has been largely dominated by the project scheduling literature in the past, as short term and reactive decision-making bring new challenges and opportunities to project organisations and researchers.

The fourth industrial revolution, called Industry 4.0, is transforming decision-making through the increasing use of information and digitization technologies. While Industry 4.0 is expanding rapidly in manufacturing industries, its induced transformations are gradually affecting other sectors, including the construction industry. In recent years, the use of 4.0 technologies in the construction industry, termed as ‘Construction 4.0’, has increased, mostly due to the immense potential of Industry 4.0 for improving the performance of construction projects and structuring their underlying management processes. This paper proposes a classification of existing literature on applications of Construction 4.0 technologies to allow for a better analysis of trends and gaps in the research. A total of nearly 200 research papers between 2009 and 2020 were reviewed and analyzed. Overall, the analysis shows that research on Construction 4.0 is closely aligned with the construction phase. Also, the most researched topics seem to be related to the management processes of quality, risk, and health and safety.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to propose a new business process representation adapted to the needs of Industry 4.0 to facilitate the implementation of technological solutions in the construction sector.Design/methodology/approach: This work is based on the Design Research Methodology approach and includes four phases: (1) a literature review on the main business process modeling standards and their ability to take into account the specificities of Industry 4.0; (2) the identification of the attributes to be considered to model Industry 4.0 processes; (3) the development of a mapping model for Industry 4.0; and (4) the validation of the model using a case study from the construction sector.Findings: To the authors’ knowledge, current business process modeling standards do not effectively represent business processes in the context of Industry 4.0.Originality/value: The proposed model can represent not only the 4.0 solutions that can be implemented in the construction sector, particularly from a technology and data perspective but also measures, with the help of performance indicators, the impacts of successive process changes in terms of skills, cost and time for a true 4.0 transformation.

This paper presents an overview of the existing literature on Construction 4.0 technologies over the past decade and their most common applications in both research and practice, aimed at achieving three objectives. First, the search for the most relevant articles on Construction 4.0, published in the scientific literature, and small firms that are developing and delivering 4.0 technologies in the construction industry allows to identify the numerous applications associated with Construction 4.0. Second, the applications found in the scientific literature and those identified in practice are classified and compared based on a framework consisting of three distinct axes. Third, the classification framework highlights current research trends and potential areas for future research, which can be summarized as follows: (i) development of hybrid digital solutions; (ii) alignment with effective collection of more structured data, smart interactive web technologies, robotics, autonomous systems, and intelligent built assets; and (iii) strengthen the capacities of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Project control requires many processes which differ from one project management standard to another. In this paper, project control is investigated based on two different standards: PMBOK and PRINCE2. The aim is to identify which processes are central to project control through network analysis. The results open up a new vision of looking at project control by stating that not only the traditional triangle of quality, time, and cost control but also change control and corrective action decision-making are at the core of project control.