Methods for monitoring construction off-road vehicle emissions: a critical review for identifying deficiencies and directions

The paper reviews the existing applications of sensing technologies for measuring construction off-road vehicle emissions (COVE) such as earthmoving equipment. The current literature presented different measurement methods and reported the results of utilisation of new technologies for measuring COVE. However, previous papers used different technology applications covering only a part of the monitoring process with its own limitations. Since technologies are advancing and offering novel solutions, there is an urgent need to identify the gaps, re-evaluate the current methods, and develop a critical agenda for automating the entire process of collecting emissions data from construction sites, and monitoring the emission contributors across cities. This paper systematically identifies relevant papers through a search of three key databases—Web of Science, Engineering Valley and Scopus—covering the publications in the last decade from 2008 to 2017. An innovative robust research method was designed to select and analyse the relevant papers. The identified papers were stored in a data set, and a thematic algorithm employed to find the clusters of papers which might be potentially relevant. The selected papers were used for further micro-thematic analysis to find key relevant papers on COVE, and the gap in the literature. A sample of relevant papers was found relevant to COVE and critically reviewed by coding and content analysis. This paper critically reviews the selected papers and also shows that there is a considerable gap in the applications of new technologies for measuring in-use COVE in real time based on real activities toward automated methods. This review enables practitioners and scholars to gain a concrete understanding of the gap in measuring COVE and to provide a significant agenda for future technology applications.