Collaboration in BIM-based construction networks: A bibliometric-qualitative literature review

TL;DR: In this paper, a "Collaboration Pentagon" consisting of context, process, task, team and actor is created through integration of relevant frameworks, and a bibliometric analysis of 1031 studies on BIM alongside the outcome of a qualitative evaluation of a total of 62 carefully selected papers on collaboration in BbCNs is presented.

About: This article is published in International Journal of Project Management.The article was published on 2017-10-01 and is currently open access. It has received 254 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Body of knowledge & Construction management.

Summary

1. Introduction

• As one of the most influential innovations in construction industry, BIM is capable of supporting project management in procurement, construction, pre-fabrication and facility management areas (Bryde et al., 2013).
• BIM is a “multifunctional set of instrumentalities for specific purposes that will increasingly be integrated” (Miettinen and Paavola, 2014).

2. Collaboration on construction projects

• According to the seminal study by Wood and Gray (1991), “collaboration occurs when a group of autonomous stakeholders of a problem domain engage in an interactive process, using shared rules, norms, and structures, to act or decide on issues related to that domain”.
• Thomson et al. (2009) expounded on the foregoing definition and stated that collaboration requires negotiations among the parties involved to jointly create rules and structures for mutually beneficial relationships.
• Collaboration is not defined in the same way across different disciplines (Thomson et al., 2009, Bedwell et al., 2012).
• This similarly holds for the construction management field as discussed below.
• Collaboration on construction projects is closely linked with communications and seamless share of information among stakeholders (Pryke, 2004, Hughes et al., 2012, Xue et al., 2010, Walker et al., 2017).

2.1. BIM-based construction networks (BbCNs)

• Members of BbCNs typically come from different disciplines, each one with a particular set of skills to enable BbCNs of fulfilling project requirements (Grilo et al., 2013).
• As put by Ashcraft (2008), a BIM-enabled project in absence of collaboration means nothing but “scratching the surface”.
• This has highlighted the crucial role of access to interoperable tools and packages for BbCNs (Grilo and Jardim-Goncalves, 2010, Hu et al., 2016).
• Besides, the necessity of framing the project environment and shifting common practices to foster collaboration among members in BbCNs has been emphasised (Merschbrock, 2012, Poirier et al., 2016, Grilo and Jardim-Goncalves, 2010, Alreshidi et al., 2016).
• This necessitates looking into the problem with all the antecedents of collaboration included (Merschbrock, 2012, Poirier et al., 2016, Alreshidi et al., 2016).

2.2. Theoretical lens

• Research into collaboration has been an active field across a wide range of disciplines and industries over the past decades, which has mobilised agential and social perspectives (Giddens, 1984, Porpora, 2013).
• The major factors acting as antecedents of collaboration in different industries are similar as asserted in the seminal study by Wood and Gray (1991).
• As such, several investigators have attempted to define generic antecedents for collaboration to be used across different industries and sectors.
• Moreover, according to the Co-Spaces Collaborative Working Model (CCWM) by Patel et al. (2012), collaboration antecedents are categorised into context, tasks, support, interaction processes, individuals, teams and overarching factors.
• Having the context of BbCNs in mind, recently, Poirier et al. (2016) aggregated the findings of noteworthy studies from a wide range of domains and identified five factors termed as process, artefact, structure, agent and context, by creating a framework for outlining collaboration antecedents for innovative methodologies such as BIM, which enable PM practice.

2.3. Collaboration Pentagon

• Drawing upon the framework proposed by Poirier et al. (2016) and the CCWM model proposed by Patel et al. (2012), the collaboration antecedents in BbCNs have been synthesized into a so-called Collaboration Pentagon as illustrated in Context Process Structure ArtefactAgent Collaboration Figure 1.
• Arguments in support of the synthesis of the Collaboration Pentagon are presented next.
• The interaction among these antecedents induces changes in them and the process and eventually prescribes the level or depth of the resulting collaboration (Mignone et al., 2016, Alreshidi et al., 2016).
• Structure refers to the common relational system of teams.
• Accordingly, the Collaboration Pentagon in Context Process Structure ArtefactAgent Collaboration Figure 1 is considered as the theoretical lens of the present study.

3. Research methods

• The primary method utilised in the present study is a “mixed methods systematic review” as termed by Harden and Thomas (2010).
• Mixed methods systematic review studies combine and apply quantitative and qualitative methods for integration and analysis of available literature on a topic (Harden and Thomas, 2010).
• This needs a protocol to show the methods, the processes and the sampling strategies for data collection to serve the defined objectives of the study (Heyvaert et al., 2016).
• St ag e 2 Available studies on BIM 1031 studies Available studies on BIM mentioning collaboration 271 studies Scientometric Qualitative Scientometric Carefully selected studies focusing on collaboration 62 studies BI M li ter atu re Re se ar ch as so cia ted w ith co lla bo ra tio n.
• The details of the succeeding stages as illustrated in Figure 2 are discussed next.

3.1. Scientometric analysis (stages 1 and 2)

• As illustrated in Figure 2, the first and second stages of analysis entail use of scientometric analysis.
• This has resulted in the emergence of quantified systematic techniques using computer programs to analyse available body of knowledge in an area (Yalcinkaya and Singh, 2015).
• Available tools for scientometric analysis have different capabilities and strengths, thus a thorough analysis of any field necessitates the use of several tools for different types of analysis in one study (Cobo et al., 2011).
• Scopus covers a wider range of journals in the area of construction Project Management (PM) and construction IT than the Web of Science and contains more recent publications compared against other databases (Aghaei Chadegani et al., 2013).
• The topic of the present study was related to BIM as a relatively new area of literature with studies mostly published in recent years.

3.2. Qualitative method (stage 3)

• The qualitative analysis stage followed the objective proposed by Harden and Thomas (2010) for the qualitative phase of mixed methods systematic review studies.
• As illustrated in Figure 2, this entailed comparing the concepts, themes and theories outlined in the content of a number of carefully selected studies according to the protocol of the systematic review and the study’s Collaboration Pentagon theoretical lens.
• The objective was a qualitative synthesis in which authors do not aim to create new theories but simply try to identify what different studies say and to identify the gaps.
• This typically occurs through translation of findings across the selected studies into a common language prior to offering any interpretation (Harden and Thomas, 2010).
• The theoretical lens (Collaboration Pentagon) illustrated in Context Process Structure ArtefactAgent Collaboration Figure 1, offers the common language in the present study.

4.1.1. Collaboration within BIM literature (stage 1)

• The first stage of the analysis as illustrated in Mixed methods systematic review Evaluation Dataset Method of analysis.
• Use of direct citation has become common as a measure to identify the most influential studies in a field of research (van Eck and Waltman, 2014).
• “Binary counting” method as recommended by van Eck and Waltman (2014) was applied.
• Hence, the outcome of the text-mining analysis as illustrated in Figure 4 substantiated the fact that compared to other areas of BIM research , collaboration has received less attention within the existing body of knowledge on BIM.
• Furthermore, distance-based networks created by VOSviewer show the relatedness of terms by their distance on the network.

4.1.2. Bibliographic mapping of studies associated with collaboration (stage 2)

• As illustrated in Figure 2, the second stage of the analysis involved the retrieval of data on publications associated with collaboration within the corpus of academic publications on BIM.
• This search was conducted by applying the term collaboration in the abstract/title/keywords of the identified list of studies on BIM (1031 studies).
• The network was exported to Gephi for visualisation.
• Judging from the direction of arrows, the flow of information starts from “Automation in Construction” as the source of citations on the topic.
• This measure was utilised to rank the nodes in the network, resize and recolour them based on the ranking and identify the most influential ones visually.

4.2. Qualitative phase (stage 3)

• In order to narrow down the dataset and identify the studies directly related to the topic, all the 271 identified articles were thoroughly examined by the research team to identify the contents covered by each study.
• To this end, each study has been examined carefully by at least two members of the research team to identify the relevancy of each study to collaboration in BbCNs, based on the Collaboration Pentagon as the theoretical lens in this research study.
• Such a qualitative analysis shapes and organises the coding system while leaving researchers open to discovery and change.
• This is through creating a list of a priori codes (Saldana, 2009) and assigning the pieces of information to these codes.
• The research team reviewed the full texts of all 62 selected studies and assigned the content to the codes manifested in Context Process Structure ArtefactAgent Collaboration Figure 1.

4.2.1. Context

• The analysis of contents of these studies brought to light that under this category, 2 broad areas have been explored as the potential avenues to enhance collaboration.
• Alreshidi et al. (2016) acknowledged this premise and termed such as impacts as “socio-organisational aspects”.
• Accordingly, several remedial solutions as below have been suggested in the literature in order to establish such a supportive environment.
• Within the Context antecedent, lack of a legal framework to manipulate the organisational environment and support intra-organisational collaboration was found to be a major barrier to collaboration (Porwal and Hewage, 2013, Alreshidi et al., 2016, Merschbrock and Munkvold, 2015, Rezgui et al., 2013).
• According to such studies, BIM educational programs need to be realigned by universities to foster collaboration and train graduates to support a collaborative organisational environment.

4.2.2. Process

• These studies have attempted to draw upon the capabilities provided by technology (almost entirely referring to information communication technology) to address the issues of collaboration in BbCNs.
• The review of the contents showed that these studies have addressed the matter under the two broad categories termed as the items below.
• Tools and software, Networks Seminal studies addressing the topic such as Singh et al. (2011), Underwood and Isikdag (2011), Gu and London (2010) and Succar (2009) put a great emphasis on utilisation of tools and software as a measure to support collaboration in BbCNs.
• Nevertheless, the trend is directing towards use of sophisticated tools such as virtual hands and avatars to create a sense of being there in meetings (Wang et al., 2014a), engaging on-site personnel with BIM-kiosks (Brathen and Moum, 2016) and the use of various methods derived from augmented reality (Gheisari et al., 2016, Wang et al., 2014b, Jiao et al., 2013b).

4.2.4. Structure

• Structure as an antecedent refers to the role of a team configuration and the relational procedures in place, which according to evidence are influential factors on collaboration in BbCNs (Mignone et al., 2016).
• The best approach for defining different roles and responsibilities (Hassan Ibrahim, 2013, London and Singh, 2013, Ku and Pollalis, 2009) , the design of relationships (Robson et al., 2016) and the best procedure for knowledge sharing (London and Singh, 2013, Mignone et al., 2016, Van Gassel et al., 2014) have been the main areas of investigation under this category.

4.2.5. Agent

• The review of studies on the topic showed that 13 studies out of total (21%) have focused on the role of individual team members, that is the Agent antecedent, in influencing collaboration in BbCNs (see Table 1).
• Such studies focus on team members’ own set of professional skills, knowledge and experiences alongside their motivation or selection (Papadonikolaki et al., 2016) to collaborate in BbCNs.
• Focusing on expertise of BIM actors is becoming a new area of research (Pezeshki and Ivari, 2016), yet has remained unexplored with regard to collaboration in BbCNs.

5. Discussion of the findings

• Drawing upon the findings of a mixed methods systematic review, several original views and novel insights with regard to available literature on collaboration in BbCNs came to light.
• The science mapping techniques applied to available studies on BIM showed that collaboration is a core research area addressed within BIM literature (Yalcinkaya and Singh, 2015, He et al., 2017).
• The findings also revealed that collaboration has been almost entirely addressed from a technology-oriented lens.
• The proposed Collaboration Pentagon advances their knowledge of collaboration antecedents for BbCNs by highlighting the pivotal role of interactions and emphasising the necessity of considering these antecedents from an all-inclusive perspective.
• The outcome of such an assessment reveals how the scholarship has treated the matter from a disjointed and fragmented approach.

6. Conclusion and Future Research

• Fertile grounds for research on collaboration in BbCNs came to the light as the outcome of the present study.
• Particular attention is to be paid to investigating the factors associated with Artefacts, Agents and Structure antecedents of collaboration in BbCNs.
• The main limitation concerns the coverage of the study.
• That is because, with the use of particular keywords, there may be a number of publications that have not been included in the search outcome.
• Besides, matching and coding the contents of carefully selected studies on collaboration with items of the Collaboration Pentagon was a subjective process in nature which is open to different interpretations.

Figures

Figure 6. Co-occurrence network of author keywords for the studies associated with collaboration in BbCNs

Figure 2. Mixed methods systematic review procedure

Figure 5. The network of main outlets for publications associated with collaboration in BbCNs

Figure 4. Most co-occurred terms in BIM literature (title and abstract of studies)

Table 1. Studies directly targeting collaboration in BbCNs and the antecedents targeted in each study (see Figure 1 as well)

Figure 3. Most influential studies in BIM body of knowledge (density visualization network)

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What have the authors contributed in "Collaboration on bim-based construction networks: a scientometric-qualitative literature review" ?

The present study intends to address this gap by plotting the storyline of relevant research studies in the last 10 years ( 2006-2016 ). The study draws upon a scientometric analysis of 1031 studies on BIM alongside the outcome of a qualitative evaluation of a total of 62 carefully selected papers on collaboration in BbCNs. The findings reveal that the scholarship on collaboration on BIMenabled projects has predominately focused on technology as one antecedent of collaboration while project-related and managerial antecedents have remained under-researched. The study contributes to the field through this inclusive Collaboration Pentagon and by providing a systematic and objective evaluation of available literature on collaboration in BbCNs and uncovering respective gaps. 

Q2. What are the future works mentioned in the paper "Collaboration on bim-based construction networks: a scientometric-qualitative literature review" ?

The gap related to Structure warrants further research to identify the best practices for planning the procedure, contractual features and supportive organisational structures where BbCNs are involved. Above all, the main theoretical contribution of the study is the suggestion of the Collaboration Pentagon as an inclusive analysis tool for future studies that departs from isolated antecedents of collaboration in BbCNs. Future investigators have to consider the interacting impacts and the synergy among antecedents of collaboration in BbCNs as dispensable elements of the collaboration system for planning their research designs and in turn informing PM practitioners on how to collaborate with BIM. That is because, with the use of particular keywords, there may be a number of publications that have not been included in the search outcome.