Transition from building information modeling (BIM) to integrated digital delivery (IDD) in sustainable building management: A knowledge discovery approach based review

Over the past decade, building information modeling (BIM) and sustainability have attracted increased interest, with a concomitant rise in the number of related publications. However, research efforts made in BIM for sustainable building management, especially using in all four Integrated Digital Delivery (IDD) phases are minimal. Therefore, this study features a combined scientometric analysis and IDD thematic discussion examining 471 scholarly bibliographies accessed from the Web of Science (WoS) database. The purpose of this study is to statistically classify BIM-sustainability publications from 2007 to 2019 in order to understand the research status, key themes, trends, and future challenges to be addressed in the field of sustainable BIM. The most influential scholars, institutes, regions/countries, articles, and journals have been identified. Moreover, clustering analyses identified topics that sustainable BIM research tended to gravitate toward, such as cloud approaches, data sharing, life cycle energy efficiency, and informetric analysis. The top 100 most cited documents from WoS were also manually classified into four quadrants of IDD, namely design, fabrication, construction, and asset delivery and management. Ten BIM-sustainability phenomena were observed throughout the life cycle of IDD. Finally, key research gaps and important areas for future research in this field were identified. The clearly delineated clusters and themes provide a practical overview and a deeper understanding of the current research progress of IDD for building sustainability, highlighting the challenges and research gaps for future research.