Smart Techniques Promoting Sustainability in Construction Engineering and Management

• This research conducts a comprehensive analysis of advancements in construction engineering and management (CEM) with smart techniques. • It showcases applications of smart techniques within CEM. • Highlights the integration potential of smart techniques in CEM. • Explores future research paths for smart construction in CEM. Construction engineering and management (CEM) has become increasingly complicated with the increasing size of engineering projects under different construction environments, motivating the digital transformation of CEM. To contribute to a better understanding of the state of the art of smart techniques for engineering projects, this paper provides a comprehensive review of multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques, intelligent techniques, and their applications in CEM. First, a comprehensive framework detailing smart technologies for construction projects is developed. Next, the characteristics of CEM are summarized. A bibliometric review is then conducted to investigate the keywords, journals, and clusters related to the application of smart techniques in CEM during 2000–2022. Recent advancements in intelligent techniques are also discussed under the following six topics: ① big data technology; ② computer vision; ③ speech recognition; ④ natural language processing; ⑤ machine learning; and ⑥ knowledge representation, understanding, and reasoning. The applications of smart techniques are then illustrated via underground space exploitation. Finally, future research directions for the sustainable development of smart construction are highlighted.