Applications of Engineering Digitalization and Construction IT for Energy Projects

Dear colleagues,

According to the EIA 2018 outlook, the energy demand is expected to grow by about 27%, or 3743 million tons oil equivalent (Mtoe), worldwide, from 2017 to 2040.

More specifically, the energy consumption of petroleum, natural gas, and coal use combined is forecast to grow 16% from 2017 to 2040. On the other hand, the oil and gas sector has reduced its investments as a result of the fall in oil prices over the last few years, but the sector has recently shown a slow but consistent growth in investment. The Korea Export–Import Bank (KEXIM) predicted the global construction market to increase by USD 10.1 billion to USD 511.6 billion by 2019. This is largely because of a projected increase of plant orders from the Middle East as a result of rising oil prices.  

According to recent studies, a large number of engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) contractors on megaprojects in the energy sector have suffered from massive profit losses. There are many causes that can be attributed to the losses, but one of the major causes that has been pointed out is a poor understanding about project complexity, which the project creates as a result of its large size, and subsequently poor project management planning and execution during pre-construction and construction. Another challenge that the industry faces is the fact that the construction sector has had a labor-productivity growth rate of 1% per year in the global market over the past two decades, compared with 2.8% for the total world economy and 3.6% for manufacturing.

The rapid development of digital technology in recent years will provide an opportunity to overcome these limitations of management. Those technologies include, but are not limited to, the following: (a) unmanned aerial vehicles for surveying, quality assessment, and project progress monitoring; (b) remote sensing methods such as light detection and ranging for effective surveying; (c) point cloud-based surveying data creation; (d) building information modeling (BIM)-based design and engineering; (e) various sensing technologies to improve job site safety; (f) artificial intelligence-based project risk detection; (g) automated schedule monitoring and progress evaluation based on digitalized planned schedule; (h) texting mining and natural language processing (NLP)-based project document review, evaluation and compliance checking; and (i) digitalized design and engineering data-based project work flow re-engineering. 

This Special Issue will collect the state-of the art advancements in these areas that may have significant implications to the construction industry, especially for the energy sector and academia. Both technical papers and case studies are welcome for publication in this Special Issue.

Prof. Dr. Eul-Bum Lee
Prof. Dr. H. David Jeong
Guest Editor

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