Construction Industry 4.0 and Sustainability: An Enabling Framework

Governments worldwide are taking actions to address the construction sector's sustainability concerns, including high carbon emissions, health and safety risks, low productivity, increasing costs. Applying Industry 4.0 technologies (also referred as Construction 4.0) could some of these concerns. However, current understanding about this is quite limited, with previous work being largely fragmented limited both in terms well their interrelationships triple bottom line perspectives. The focus article therefore on addressing gaps by proposing a comprehensive multi-dimensional framework that identifies categorizes key positive negative impacts environmental, economic, social sustainability, then establishing its applicability/usefulness through an empirical, multimethodology case study assessment UAE's sector. findings indicate 4.0’s environmental economic far outweigh effects, although comparable regards sustainability. On itself, application was found be nonuniform greater seen for building information modeling automation vis-à-vis others such cyber-physical systems smart materials, significant growth expected future blockchain- three-dimensional-printing-related technologies. proposed novel enable development policy interventions support mechanisms increase deployment while sustainability-related impacts. also has potential adapted applied other country sectoral contexts.