Submissions

Digital Twins for Smart and Sustainable Built Environments: Perspectives from SASBE 2025

This special issue presents a selection of outstanding papers from the Smart and Sustainable Built Environment (SASBE 2025) Conference, held in Lille, France, 3–5 November 2025. SASBE 2025 brought together leading researchers and practitioners under the overarching theme of building renovation and restoration, spanning four major clusters: technologies and data for the built environment; sustainability, climate, and ecological transition; sustainable urban planning and quality of life; and management, governance, and knowledge.

This special issue focuses specifically on the theme of Digital Twins and Connected Technologies, drawing from contributions addressing real-time synchronised digital tools used to monitor, simulate, and manage buildings and urban infrastructures, including digital twins, smart technologies, IoT, sensor networks, and intelligent agents. The selected papers represent the highest-quality submissions from a pool of over 200 conference contributions, offering cutting-edge insights into how digital twin technologies are reshaping the design, operation, and sustainability performance of the built environment.

This special issue is guest edited by Professor Farzad Pour Rahimian (Loughborough University, UK), Honorary Chair of SASBE 2025, together with co-guest editors Professor Abiola Akanmu (Virginia Tech University, USA) and Dr M. Reza Hosseini (The University of Melbourne, Australia), who served as Scientific Chairs of the conference.

ECPPM 2026: Advancing the semantic continuum across scales towards intelligent built environments

The digital transformation of the built environment is entering a new phase. Building Information Modelling has established an important foundation for structured information management, interoperability and collaborative working across design, construction and operation. However, emerging requirements increasingly extend beyond the boundaries of individual BIM models. Increasingly connected urban systems are creating a need for digital representations that operate across multiple spatial, temporal and organisational scales.

Building on the theme of ECPPM 2026, “Advancing the semantic continuum across scales towards an intelligent urban environment”, this special issue will explore how the construction informatics community can progress from fragmented and application-specific information models towards connected, semantically enriched and increasingly intelligent digital ecosystems.

The concept of a semantic continuum is central to this ambition. Information about materials, components, products, buildings, infrastructure and urban systems is still frequently created and managed in separate environments, using different schemas, standards and levels of abstraction. Similar discontinuities exist across lifecycle stages, from design and construction to operation, adaptation, reuse and deconstruction. Overcoming these boundaries requires more than technical data exchange. It requires information that remains interpretable, computable and actionable as it moves across scales, disciplines and lifecycle stages.

The special issue will therefore seek contributions addressing both the foundations and emerging frontiers of this transition. Particular areas of interest include:

• semantic interoperability, ontologies, knowledge graphs and linked building data;

• evolution of BIM towards digital twins and federated digital ecosystems;

• integration of BIM with IoT, GIS, product data and operational information;

• AI, large language models and agentic systems interacting with built-environment information;

• trustworthy, explainable and semantically grounded AI for the built environment;

• lifecycle information continuity, Digital Product Passports and circularity;

• multi-scale information modelling, from materials and components to buildings, districts and cities;

• open standards, information requirements and data governance;

• human, organisational and societal dimensions of increasingly intelligent built environments.

A particular objective of the special issue is to encourage critical reflection on the future role of BIM. Rather than assuming that digital twins or AI simply replace BIM, contributions are invited to examine how established modelling principles, semantic technologies and emerging forms of machine intelligence can be combined to support the next generation of digital built environments.

The issue will include selected and substantially extended papers originating from ECPPM 2026, complemented where appropriate by invited contributions addressing the wider theme. All submissions will undergo the normal ITcon peer-review process and will be expected to demonstrate a clear scientific contribution beyond the corresponding conference paper.

Proposed guest editors:

Prof. Yacine Rezgui, Cardiff University

Dr Cristina De Nardi, Cardiff University

Dr Ali Ghoroghi, Cardiff University