Review of ICT Implementations for Facilitating Information Flow between Virtual Models and Construction Project Sites

Information and communications technology (ICT) has had major effects on the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) research fields in recent decades, but a comprehensive and in-depth review of how ICT has been used to enable different modes of information flow on project sites is missing from the current literature. To fill this gap, this paper defines a systematic approach for classifying information flow modes and uses this method to determine trends in information communication modes reported in recent publications. These trends were determined through the identification and analysis of 119 journal articles published between 2005 and 2015 in order to determine the mode of information flow reported. The results show that the majority of papers (70.6%) report a unidirectional flow of information, while a much smaller portion report one of two bidirectional information flow modes (26.9% non-automated, and 2.5% automated). The contribution of this work is in systematically defining current trends in ICT publications related to information flow and also in the identification of the typical technologies used to enable these communication modes.