The special issue
Guest edited with Mahesh Babu Purushothaman, Amirhosein Ghaffarianhoseini and Farzad Pour Rahimian, the special issue appeared in volume 30 of the Journal of Information Technology in Construction in 2025. It gathered fifteen papers selected from the Smart and Sustainable Built Environment conference held at AUT in November 2024.
The papers
Its papers range across:
- Virtual reality for environmental assessment
- Wearable robotics for worker safety
- Machine learning in heritage preservation
- 3D printing in modular construction
- BIM integration and digital twins
- Mixed reality in construction education
- IoT systems for indoor environmental quality
- Blockchain for sustainability reporting
- Photovoltaic façade performance
Significance
ITcon is one of the longest established journals in construction informatics and is published open access, so the special issue makes the research freely available worldwide. Its breadth shows how far digital technology now reaches into construction, from the safety of workers on site to the reporting of sustainability across supply chains. For the authors, many of them early career researchers, it offered a route from a conference presentation to a peer reviewed journal article.
From conference to journal
Turning conference presentations into journal articles is one of the most valuable things a conference can do for its authors. Conference papers are short and quickly reviewed; journal articles are fuller, more rigorously reviewed and more widely read. A special issue offers a structured route between the two, with guest editors who know the work and can help authors develop it.
Selecting fifteen papers from a conference of 165 meant choosing the work with the strongest potential to make a contribution to the journal literature in construction informatics.