Construction industry and the Industry 4.0 concept: a review

Abstract

Introduction. The concept of Industry 4.0, which is considered the fourth industrial revolution, includes collective concepts of technologies such as the Internet of Things, virtual and augmented reality, 3D printing, printed electronics, artificial intelligence, etc. It was introduced in Germany in 2011. The purpose of the article is to analyze the publication activity focused on Industry 4.0 technologies in the construction industry and the development of construction technologies. Materials and methods. To achieve the goal set in this study, a bibliometric and bibliographic review of international scientific publications was carried out. At the first stage, the co-authors decided to use scientific publications indexed in Scopus and RSCI, for which three key word sampling were made: Keywords for the first sampling: the fourth industrial revolution; Keywords for the second sampling: The Fourth Industrial Revolution and construction industry; Keywords for the third sampling: Industry 4.0 and construction. Given that a small number of publications in the RSCI database — the database of the Russian Science Citation Index (4) — meet the requirements, the co-authors decided to analyze the publications from the list made by the Scopus database. At the same time, sampling 3 was selected for the analysis, as the most complete and suitable for the purposes of the study. Further, the co-authors collected data on scientific publications covering the research topic, and conducted a bibliometric analysis to develop a cluster map of relationships between the key words and a bibliographic analysis to select the scientific publications to be reviewed. Results. In accordance with the pre-set restrictions, the co-authors analyzed the articles published from 2011 to 2020. In total, 591 publications were left in the sampling. The information about these articles was converted to RIS format for its further analysis and visualization of bibliometric parameters. At the same time, few articles focus on research or development of Industry 4.0 technologies (27); hence, most of the publications represent overviews. Conclusions. The analysis of publications made it possible to single out two key Industry 4.0 technologies applied in the construction industry: information modeling and 3D printing. At the same time, the development of technologies for additive construction (3D printing) is one of the most dynamically developing areas of research in the field of the cutting-edge construction science. First of all, it refers to 3D Concrete Printing, which also contributed to the inception and development of a number of related research areas in the field of building materials related to the control of rheological and technological properties of dispersed building mixtures, the control of the hardening kinetics of materials that have mineral binders, dispersed reinforcement and other methods of increasing the strength characteristics of composites that feature hydration hardening, tension in bending, etc.