Purpose: Despite the opportunities of digital twins (DTs) for smart buildings, limited research has been conducted regarding the facility management stage, and this is explained by the high complexity of accurately representing and modelling the physics behind the DTs process. This study thus organises and consolidates the fragmented literature on DTs implementation for smart buildings at the facility management stage by exploring the enablers, applications and challenges and examining the interrelationships amongst them.Design/methodology/approach: A systematic literature review approach is adopted to analyse and synthesise the existing literature relating to the subject topic.Findings: The study revealed six main categories of enablers of DTs for smart building at the facility management stage, namely perception technologies, network technologies, storage technologies, application technologies, knowledge-building and design processes. Three substantial categories of DTs application for smart buildings were revealed at the facility management stage: efficient operation and service monitoring, efficient building energy management and effective smart building maintenance. Subsequently, the top four major challenges were identified as being “lack of a systematic and comprehensive reference model”, “real-time data integration”, “the complexity and uncertainty nature of real-time data” and “real-time data visualisation”. An integrative framework is finally proposed by examining the interactive relationship amongst the enablers, the applications and the challenges.Practical implications: The findings could guide facility managers/engineers to fairly understand the enablers, applications and challenges when DTs are being implemented to improve smart building performance and achieve user satisfaction at the facility management stage.Originality/value: This study contributes to the knowledge body on DTs by extending the scope of the existing studies to identify the enablers and applications of DTs for smart buildings at the facility management stage and the specific challenges.

Purpose: Digital twins provide enormous opportunities for smart buildings. However, an up-to-date intellectual landscape to understand and identify the major opportunities of digital twins for smart buildings is still not enough. This study, therefore, performs an up-to-date comprehensive literature review to identify the major opportunities of digital twins for smart buildings.Design/methodology/approach: Scientometric and content analysis are utilised to comprehensively evaluate the intellectual landscape of the general knowledge of digital twins for smart buildings.Findings: The study uncovered 24 opportunities that were further categorised into four major opportunities: efficient building performance (smart “building” environment), efficient building process (smart construction site environment), information efficiency and effective user interactions. The study further identified the limitations of the existing studies and made recommendations for future research in the methodology adopted and the research domain. Five research domains were considered for future research, namely “real-time data acquisition, processing and storage”, “security and privacy issues”, “standardised and domain modelling”, “collaboration between the building industry and the digital twin developers” and “skilled workforce to enable a seamless transition from theory to practice”.Practical implications: All stakeholders, including practitioners, policymakers and researchers in the field of “architecture, engineering, construction and operations” (AECO), may benefit from the findings of this study by gaining an in-depth understanding of the opportunities of digital twins and their implementation in smart buildings in the AECO industry. The limitations and the possible research directions may serve as guidelines for streamlining the practical adoption and implementation of digital twins for smart buildings.Originality/value: This study adopted scientometric and content analysis to comprehensively assess the intellectual landscape of relevant literature and identify four major opportunities of digital twins for smart building, to which scholars have given limited attention. Finally, a research direction framework is presented to address the identified limitations of existing studies and help envision the ideal state of digital twins for smart buildings.

Over the past 3 years, the global construction sector has been severely affected by the noxious coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Visionary construction stakeholders, including governments, practitioners, and academia, all have been actively devising strategies to deal with the crisis caused by the pandemic. Despite the rich contributions by academia, an in-depth review of their research works to understand how the pandemic has been handled to position the construction industry for post-pandemic actions and future pandemics is hitherto lacking. Hence, an up-to-date literature review is conducted in this study to better understand this terra incognita. It does so by adopting a six-step thematic analysis of 159 empirical peer-reviewed research articles in relation to COVID-19 on construction. The review discovered a growing research interest from different countries from 2020 to 2022. The existing studies can be put under four major topics, namely the COVID-19 impacts, challenges and opportunities, responding strategies, and post-COVID-19 interventions. A framework consisting of four categories of responding strategies, namely vaccination, personal responsibility of workers, government-instructional practices, and organisation-based approaches, is proposed through the lens of the socio-technical system theory to handle the pandemic crisis in construction. Limitations of the existing studies were further identified. Four pertinent research directions were finally proposed: building upon and testing the proposed COVID-19 response framework, adoption of more advanced innovative strategies to increase productivity amid pandemics and survive the risk of future pandemics, beyond the technological response to COVID-19 in construction, and post-pandemic view of the construction industry. This study contributes to the knowledge body by providing a candid evaluation of the knowledge contributed by academia to deal with the risks of future pandemics in the global construction industry.

Despite the growing rich and fragmented literature focusing on quality assurance (QA) and Industry 4.0, the implementation of associated individual digital technologies has not been fully evaluated and synthesised to achieve adequate QA in the construction industry; hence, it has received limited focus. This study, thus, aimed to organise, evaluate, and synthesise the current literature on individual digital technology applications in QA in the construction industry and propose future research directions. A literature review approach was adopted for this study along with Deming’s cycle framework to address four research questions: (1) What is the status of the state-of-the-art in the literature? (2) What digital technologies have been applied for QA in the construction industry? (3) Which areas in QA processes have experienced digital technology applications, and what are the applications? (4) What are the limitations of the existing studies and future research directions of digital technologies for QA in the construction industry? The findings showed an increasing trend of research on digital technology for QA in construction since 2017. This cuts across 23 countries with six different research methods published across 18 different publication sources. Four categories of digital technologies were revealed to have been adopted for QA in construction based on the functionality of the technologies: data collection technologies, decision-oriented technologies, collaborative technologies, and transparency and security-related technologies. Evaluation with Deming’s cycle framework revealed that digital technologies have a high level of application at the “do” phase, improving the quality management process during construction towards achieving pre-stated quality requirements. This includes mostly collaborative technologies, consisting of BIM technologies. Limitations of the existing studies were further identified, and this led to five research directions: interoperability of technology development, integrated digital technologies for QA of prefabricated and modular construction, integrated digital technologies for QA of cross-border construction logistics and supply chain, digital innovation for sustainable QA, and moving beyond the technical solution. The study showed a significant contribution to both academia and the industry in the built environment.

Financing rail infrastructure development in developing countries has hitherto received scant academic attention, especially in empirical developments. This research study assesses the policy provisions and institutional behavioral factors influencing rail infrastructure financing in developing countries such as Ghana. An empirical and positivist epistemological lens was adopted using triangulation between deductive and inductive approaches to test three hypotheses. Methods adopted included questionnaire survey and interviews to gather primary data, and inferential statistics such as bivariate linear regression analysis. Factors identified that inhibit rail infrastructure development in developing countries include ineffective monitoring and evaluation, a largely neglected rail sector, and archaic financing posture. Based on the findings, prescriptive guidance on financing future rail infrastructure for policy makers and governments is delineated. This novel research identifies a number of interventions that, if implemented, will engender socioeconomic and regional intertrade integration and prosperity to the subregion of West Africa.