Ng, Ming Shan, Thomas Bock, Fabian Kastner, and Silke Langenberg. 2024. “Digital Transformation, Sustainability and Construction 5.0.” In Proceedings of the 41st ISARC, 1222–29. Lille, France. https://doi.org/10.22260/ISARC2024/0158.
The United Nations has set the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development for the society, the environment and the economy with the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Countries act in collaborative partnership to take transformative steps to shift industries and society onto a sustainable and resilient path. Among all, digital transformation is one key domain of transformation to achieve sustainability. In the architecture, engineering, construction and operations (AECO) sector, the industry is slowly adopting digital transformation to different extents such as the use of Building Information Modelling (BIM), Internet of Things (IoT), computational tools, as well as automation in design and construction. Despite the commonly known practices and benefits of digital transformation such as productivity increase, the impacts of such transformation on sustainability have not yet been fully examined in research. The industry entails the corresponding digital transformation practices and their relationships with sustainability, so as to consider appropriate strategies. This work first investigates how the current practice in AECO adopts digital transformation, with case studies of the Japanese industry as examples; this is followed by the study of the relationships between digital transformation practices and the SDGs based on existing literature. Hence, the strategy propositions to assist the industry in current practice are elaborated. The research contributes to science by taking an initial step to examine the relationships between digital transformation and sustainability and present ready-to-adopt strategy propositions. Future research includes in-depth validations of the strategies and comparisons of the approaches in Japan with other countries.