Modelling in off-site construction supply chain management : a review and future directions for sustainable modular integrated construction

Abstract

Off-site construction (OSC) is an innovative and sustainable construction method. One of its critical success factors is the proper management of its supply chain (SC). Recently, significant research attention has been focused on the modelling of OSC-SC to improve its performance and sustainability. However, the literature still lacks a comprehensive review of the modelling studies on off-site construction -supply chain management (OSC-SCM). Therefore, this research contributes by providing a comprehensive and up-to-date mapping and clustering of 309 journal articles on the modelling of OSC-SC to identify its trends and gaps, and hence, highlight future research opportunities. To achieve these objectives, a mixed review method, consisting of scientometric and systematic reviews, is used. The scientometric review identifies the most prolific journals, researchers, co-occurrence network of keywords, and their citation bursts. On the other hand, the systematic review classifies the articles based on OSC type and supply chain (SC) stage. At each SC stage, the articles are further classified based on problem settings and solution methods. The results show that production problems have received the most attention (i.e., by 28% of the included articles), followed by on-site construction (19%), design (13%), and logistics (7%) problems. However, researchers are more inclined to address problems at multiple SC stages (33%) due to the interrelationship between these stages. Besides, the systematic analysis shows that OSC-SC problems have been solved frequently by a variety of solution methods such as optimization (25%), simulation (13%) and building information modelling (BIM) (9.5%). However, researchers tend more to integrate multiple solution methods (35%) to address the complexities of OSC-SC problems. Finally, the included studies are classified based on the three sustainability dimensions. The results show that economic, environmental, and social sustainability dimensions have been considered in previous studies by 72%, 24%, and 4%, respectively. Therefore, the study identifies research gaps at each SC stage of each OSC type to incentivize future studies to consider more environmental and social sustainability factors in OSC-SC models. Since modular integrated construction (MiC) has the highest prefabrication level, this study provides future research directions for sustainable supply chain management (SCM) in MiC. The present research is an important reference guide that helps researchers and practitioners to understand different problem settings and their solution methods in OSC-SCM.