SPECIAL FEATURE: ORIGINAL ARTICLE People, Technology and Governance for Sustainability: The Contribution of Systems and Cyber-systemic Thinking Sustainable management of construction site big visual data Andrej Tibaut 1 • Damjan Zazula 2 Received: 30 July 2017 / Accepted: 20 June 2018 Ó Springer Japan KK, part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract Architecture, Engineering, Construction, Operation and Ownership (AECOO) team up in a multi-disciplinary collaborative system to create buildings and infrastructure. The participating disciplines have reached a state in which traditional methods and forms of input data introduce entropy that compromises sustainable construction in larger projects. It became difficult to reach planned optimum project duration and costs this way. New approaches based on the systematic digi- talization of the building lifecycle, from design to demolition, can solve the problem by involving the concepts of building information modeling (BIM) systems and big data. Previous research on BIM and big data only studied the potential for construction performance. In addition to extending research into systems’ thinking and technical sustainability of big visual data, this paper extends our previous work in the area by introducing a new conceptual and technical framework for sustainable management of construction site big visual data. Keywords Construction site monitoring Á Big visual data Á Building information modelling Á Man–Machine–Environment System Engineering Á ICT framework Introduction A construction site is an engineering phenomenon where many mechanistic workflows interoperate in a predicted manner (Beardsworth et al. 1988). The predicted behavior is the result of the model-based view that engineers use when they design buildings and infrastructure. The model- based engineering approach in Architecture, Engineering, Construction, Operation and Ownership (AECOO) ranges from modeling labor productivity (Thomas et al. 1990), to model-based design and engineering (Rebolj et al. 2008), to information-based modeling (Suermann et al. 2009), and to critical thoughts about the building information modeling (BIM) approach (Turk 2016). Information-based modeling allows for more complex construction projects, therefore the risk of them not progressing on schedule has become a big concern. Monitoring complex transdisci- plinary activities on the construction site is a pressing problem that challenges practitioners and researchers to address change management, as it affects people and their customs, and practices and achieve shorter project duration and minimum project costs (Omar and Nehdi 2016). Unplanned events during the construction phase may lead to undesired consequences, like safety risks (Keng and Razak 2014), and risks of delays and schedule overruns (Arashpour et al. 2015). To minimize the disruptive effects of the events, continuous monitoring of all scheduled activities on the construction site must be ensured. The monitoring process involves manual data collection obtained by direct human observation and/or automated data collection, i.e., measurements (Paolo Rocchi 2016), which result in large datasets. Many construction projects lose the benefits of carefully designed construction schedules, because they ignore pre- cise monitoring. This is a paradox, because the software tools allow for a complex construction schedule design Handled by Marialuisa Saviano, University of Salerno, Italy. & Andrej Tibaut andrej.tibaut@um.si 1 Faculty of Civil Engineering, Transportation Engineering and Architecture, University of Maribor, Smetanova ulica 17, Maribor, Slovenia 2 Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Maribor, Smetanova ulica 17, Maribor, Slovenia 123 Sustainability Science https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-018-0595-9