Building information modelling knowledge harvesting for energy efficiency in the Construction industry

Abstract

Abstract The recent adoption of building information modelling (BIM), and the quest to decarbonise our built environment, has impacted several segments of the supply chain, including design and engineering practitioners, prompting the need to redefine the construction personnel positions along with associated skills and competencies. The research informs ways in which practitioners can fully embrace the potential of BIM for energy efficiency to promote sustainable interventions by improving existing training practices and identifying new training requirements as BIM evolves and as practitioners’ ICT (Information and Communications Technology) maturity levels improve. This is achieved by adopting a novel text-mining approach which analyses social media alongside secondary sources of evidence to establish a level of correlation between BIM roles and skills. The use of ontological dependency analysis has helped to understand the degree of correlation of skills with roles as a method to inform training and educational programmes. A key outcome from the research is a semantic web-based mining environment which determines BIM roles and skills, as well as their correlation factor, with an application for energy efficiency. The paper also evidences that (a) construction skills and roles are dynamic in nature and evolve over time, reflecting the digital transformation of the Construction industry, and (b) the importance of socio-organisational aspects in construction skills and related training provision. Graphic abstract