Application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Digital Transformation (DT) to Sustainable Engineering Project Management

Dear Colleagues,

Digital technology is fundamentally transforming virtually every industry, and like many other fields, the engineering field has witnessed disruptive changes in recent years. Consequently, industrial plant engineering (such as power plants and petro-chemical plants) is rapidly undergoing technological innovations to keep pace with the fourth industrial revolution and leverage digital transformation for sustainable growth.

In line with the rapidly changing times, plant engineering projects are pursuing transformation via digital methods throughout their productive lifecycles to boost sustainability, including the planning, design, construction, and operation and maintenance stages, by integrating intelligent technologies via digital convergence.

Key technologies commonly mentioned in recent discourse in this field include artificial intelligence (AI), digital twins and digital transformation, robotics, the metaverse, drones, 3D printing, wearable and mobility technology, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), cloud-based collaboration tools, the integration of building information modelling (BIM) and geographic information system (GIS) data, etc.

The combination of these technologies is expected to enhance operational efficiency, reduce project costs, and improve safety, ultimately contributing to the sustainability of the plant engineering industries.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include, but are not limited to, the following subjects:

• Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning applications for sustainable engineering management;
• Automation in capital projects, with a particular focus on mega-infrastructure projects, onshore and offshore drilling, power plants, industrial plants, and other engineering procurement construction (EPC) projects;
• Digitalization in the engineering and construction industries for sustainable infrastructure development;
• Building information modeling (3D-4D-5D BIM) and their applications;
• Advanced work packaging (AWP) with BIM;
• BIM-based Maintenance Repair and Operation (MRO) systems;
• Digital Twin or Digital Transformation for industrial plants;
• Natural language processing (NLP) application and text mining in construction project documents, such as technical specifications and contracts;
• chatGPT Applications in the engineering and construction field;
• Cost engineering digitalization (estimating and control);
• Digital contract management (bidding and execution).

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Prof. Dr. Eul-Bum Lee
Dr. So-Won Choi
Guest Editors

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• digitization
• digital transformation
• digital twin
• BIM
• AWP
• MRO
• AI
• big data
• NLP
• machine learning