Dear Colleagues,

Building information modelling (BIM) is widely regarded as one of the most influential innovations impacting on the construction and civil engineering industry in recent years. Indeed, BIM has been extensively sold as the panacea to industry’s perennial problems, namely: (i) poor project management team and stakeholder (such as the client and facilities management team) engagement; and (ii) the mismanagement of project information and documentation. Indisputably, BIM can have a substantial positive impact throughout the project lifecycle of a building or infrastructure development, as well as its various stages (including design, procurement, pre-fabrication, construction, and facility management). However, the progressive and exponential growth of BIM usage within contemporary businesses and throughout the industry induces changes of a phenomenal scale. This places strain on the existing skills and knowledge levels of practitioners who have to utilize or manage this digital software innovation. Therefore, whilst the BIM revolution offers a latent potential to improve sector performance, it can also (when used inappropriately) cause massive disruption to the manner in which project management teams form and work together, methods of linking and maintaining collaboration among individual project management team members, and protocols for transferring and processing project data to and from these (often geographically dispersed) members. The convergence of BIM with virtual and augmented reality, the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, and the technical advancements in Web and cloud computing will further exacerbate the disruption in the current practices of team building and teamwork on BIM-enabled projects. Despite the scale of disruption experienced by practitioners, the true impact upon team building and teamwork remain relatively unknown, and are often subject to speculation or anecdote.

This Special Issue of Applied Sciences provides a global manifesto specifically devoted to attracting the disparate efforts of the world’s leading BIM researchers on investigating and quantifying the multifaceted dimensions of this disruption. Concomitant objectives are as follows: to provide an international platform to showcase emergent findings and contribute to generating new knowledge on areas related to team work and collaboration on BIM-enabled projects; explore emerging technologies that affect teams on BIM-enabled projects, and provide case studies of change management to improve the effectives of teams on BIM-enabled projects; and report on how BIM disrupts and transforms current team relations with supply chain partners.

This Special Issue welcomes various submission types, such as original research contributions, case studies, comparative studies, conceptual papers, and review studies in the following broad areas, namely:

• Overcoming the issues posed by intellectual property rights (IPR);
• Building an effective “virtual project management team”;
• Resolving interoperability issues;
• Mitigating design and construction clashes;
• Employing applications of Industry 4.0 within a BIM-enabled project;
• Educating the future BIM-enabled workforce;
• Reducing barriers to maintaining collaboration on BIM-enabled projects;
• Enhancing knowledge, skills, and abilities associated with collaboration on BIM-enabled projects;
• Using collaboration tools and technologies on BIM-enabled projects; and
• Managing data between BIM and other technologies, and methods such as facilities management tools and enterprise resource planning systems.

Potential contributors should note that this list is not exhaustive, and that further guidance can be obtained from the Special Issue editor (Email: [email protected]).

Dr. M. Reza Hosseini
Prof. Dr. David John Edwards
Prof. Dr. Josua Pienaar
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Applied Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Industry 4.0
• building information modelling (BIM)
• collaboration
• teams
• networks
• disruption
• change management