SUSTAINABLE SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT IN CONSTRUCTION: AN EXPLORATORY REVIEW FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

. Although the importance of supply chain management in the construction sector has been recognized in recent years, its implementation still faces significant challenges. For the long-term evaluation of this creative sector, numerous intricate sustainability components, such as environmental, social, and financial, are necessary. The study focuses on long-term sustainability considerations in the supply chain in the construction sector. This work aims to address this information and examine sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) research in the construction sector in this manner. More than 95 publications were studied from the beginning of 2017 to the end of 2021 using both in-depth content analysis and bibliometric methodologies. Several issues of SSCM in construction have been found including environmental, economic and social patterns which are most commonly known as the triple bottom line, typically enhanced by artificial intelligence. Many challenges were discovered including inefficiencies in the logistics system and a shortage of funding, environmental issues in demolition procedures and difficulties in applying sustainability measures due to high skill, data, and time requirements. The article offers a broad list of potentials for improving the current situation in the construction sector by using various types of supply chains such as increasing investment in energy conservation and emission reduction technologies to drive sustainable development, establishing strong green supply chain relationships, and forming a Covid-19 financial support group for small construction companies among other things. The study’s findings suggested that due to the significance of long-term relationships between construction companies, suppliers and customers, smart technology could make it simpler to reach every supply chain link. After an exhaustive literature review 59 research questions were formulated for the future research. In the future, the importance of these questions could be determined using expert questionnaires and multi-criteria evaluation.


Introduction
The relevance of supply chain management (SCM) is increasingly recognized in the construction industry.However, its implementation has been limited and remains a challenge for researchers and practitioners (Studer & De Brito Mello, 2021).Advancements within the construction industry are slowly acknowledged (Masood et al., 2022), although sustainability is commonly used.Analysts considering supply chain (SC) and management state that the execution of local and holistic supply chains could be bet-ter if the conjuncture relations and forms between companies are effectively managed (Chandra & Kumar, 2000;Mentzer et al., 2001;Amiri et al., 2021).
SSCM can be defined as an effective and efficient management of linked social, economic and environmental aspects in the construction and maintenance of global supply chains.SSCM promotes governance techniques which decrease waste and assure long-term maintainability.It provides economic value of social and environmen-tal well-being for all stakeholders involved in the creation and delivery of products and services at all levels of their lifecycles.The application of sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) in construction companies decreases the environmental effect, decreases the hazard of failure and increases the competitiveness of construction companies (Suhi et al., 2019).The management perspective and its significance are often ignored; it determines a construction project's included value (Kivilä et al., 2017).
The construction supply chain includes contractors, producers, building materials providers, builders and engineers, the client (customer), as well as individuals, carriers, and other intermediaries who provide warehouse administration.All of the entities of SC in the construction are interconnected by joins of finance, data and materials, but not all are required in each part of the chain (Brix-Asala et al., 2018;Blengini & Shields, 2010).
Due to the activities of the entity, the clients are required to decide the structure of the construction supply chain (Goyal et al., 2018).The supply chain is treated as a chain of events and cannot be observed for a single step or stage; the SC must be treated as a network (Carter & Rogers, 2008;Moktadir et al., 2021;Heidary Dahooie et al., 2020;Zhang & Yu, 2021).A builder can get materials from different providers and exchange his items with numerous affiliates and intermediaries.SSCM emphasises a more extensive range of activities for SC directors and companies as this requires the improvement and execution of the arrangements to make strides in the environmental, financial and social administration of the accomplices (Goel et al., 2020).In common, the SSCM covers four areas: (1) data, items, and money-related administration; (2) administration of financial and social variables; (3) innovation and new project management (Iqbal et al., 2020); and (4) partner governance (Bastas & Liyanage, 2018a).
To satisfy the growing demands of construction clients, some actions must be taken to optimise logistics and building processes as current methodologies and tools are inefficient, not secure enough and unreliable (Yan et al., 2019).To remain competitive, construction companies must investigate the noteworthy potential of integrated computer innovations, artificial intelligence (AI), such as the Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain technology, etc. to address the challenge of consumer requests and administrative standards and realize trade openings through the operational efficiency (Rejeb et al., 2020;Sindhwani et al., 2022;Bakhtiarizadeh et al., 2021).Tiwari et al. (2014) conducted a literature review to assess the current level of SCM research in the construction industry.The review showed that researchers were interested in building and studying diverse decision-making approaches and issues including supply chain coordination and collaboration.Scholars have also examined the importance of material and information flows and the applicability of SCM in some geographic regions.Notwithstanding such accomplishments, it was found that most studies emphasise analyzing certain sections and fall short of establishing a holistic solution.
In this manner, this article aims to fulfil an in-depth survey of the possibilities and challenges of SSCM in the construction field, give a comprehensive picture of what has been scholastically achieved within the sphere to date, and distinguish ranges for further investigation.Furthermore, the Research Questions will be formulated and provided according to the potentials and challenges found in the SSCM in the construction sector within 2017 and 2021.This article will provide an in-depth review that is very needed in the scientific literature for other members of the construction industry related to sustainability and supply chain clusters.The scope of this research is to broaden current conceptual knowledge and theoretical boundaries as scholarly and practical interest in SSCM in the construction sector grows.Some prospective innovative concepts are investigated in this research which may give additional theoretical perspectives for SSCM in the construction industry.This research develops a continuous SSCM framework as conceptual questions for the future research with theoretical limits from existing and emerging theories added.In the future, this review article could be expanded as more research is needed to assess the importance of the Research Questions assuming that their importance is not equal.
First, a description of the methodology is given for the collection and review of references.To examine the content of the connection between the scientific articles, bibliometric indicators were used to link author-supplied keywords.The first section contains a descriptive analysis of the selected papers and conclusions, organised by the framework's subject categories.The findings section gives a broad interpretation of the results taking into the account the additional information, also, justifying information using 3 different forms of classification of SSCM: the 4-area classification, the Triple Bottom Line (of social, environmental and economic) and the different coloured clusters identified using VOSviewer.The discussion section highlights the challenges and potential of SSCM in the construction sector with a research agenda.Also, 59 research questions are presented for each challenge and potential found in the scientific papers.Finally, conclusions and limitations of the study are offered.

Materials and methods
A systematic literature review (SLR) can develop a reliable knowledge base.Implementing an SLR involves following a complex process to ensure a more thorough and unbiased search with more transparent, trustworthy and reproducible results.The protocol's implementation is outlined below.In this case, in order to find the main SSCM clusters in the construction, PRISMA flow method (Page et al., 2021) based on the rules, proposed by Amirkhani et al. (2021), was performed.According to the researchers, five main development stages can be defined (Figure 1): to design the study (stage one); to collect the data (stage two), to analyse and disseminate the data using metasearch (stage three), elimination of the duplications, an analysis of abstracts and a full paper analysis, a visualisa-tion of the collected data (stage four), the interpretation of the data and the summarisation the discussion (stage five).The objective of PRISMA is to gather significant thoughts, synthesize findings and survey the state of scholastic information regarding a specific research address or a theme (Amirkhani et al., 2021).
The orderly approach to determination is ruled by processes which reduce bias, minimise mistakes which could occur during the research and guarantee scientific thoroughness (Tranfield et al., 2003;Petticrew & Roberts, 2006).To better understand the innovations related to SSCM in construction, this article undertakes a SLR that identifies problems, compares the content and proposals of relevant scientific articles and examines how these approaches benefit the construction sector.Different search phrases were evaluated before settling on the final one for screening articles based on content.To begin, brainstorming was used to develop keywords relevant to theory and strategy.Then, using the snowball technique, new keywords were added to the preliminary review of records, yielding the following list of keywords: "supply chain", "logistics", "triple bottom line", "sustainability", "potentials" and "challenges".Finally, the search phrase included the terms 'supply chain management" and "construction" in addition to the keywords listed above.The data was evaluated using several categorisation parameters, as shown of Figure 1 in the PRISMA flow diagram (Page et al., 2021).The initial categorisation criteria confined the search to peer-reviewed journal articles written in English that were published by the end of 2021.

Planning the review
One of the main goals of this article was to summarise all creative approaches which have been published and to identify the key clusters of SC sustainability (or shorter, SSC) in the construction sector with a focus on current policies in use around the world.In this way, this article included all of the researches in the construction field which dealt with sustainable supply chain management or related to sustainability in building supply chains, meaning that the review relates to all SCM research in construction sector, including SSCM in the years between the beginning of 2017 and the end of 2021.Previous studies which did not discuss SC from the perspective of sustainable construction were not included in the analysis and were considered beyond the scope.

Conducting the review
For this study, the information from research publications was gathered from several online databases, including Science Direct (Elsevier), Emerald, Google Scholar, Web of Science (WoS) and IEEE Xplore.Given that SSCM in the construction industry is a quickly evolving and a relatively new research subject, it is critical to cover as many prospective studies as possible in this publication.The research topic was divided into two groups, the first of which focused on terms like "sustainable supply chain management", "supply chain", "sustainability indicators", "big data", and "smart risk management".The second  group contained the strings "construction" and "construction industry".
The key objective was to conduct a study of the scientific literature on SSCM in the construction industry by combining the main strings of the introductions, titles, keywords and abstracts of works.Google Scholar addressed the databases' limited output.Nonetheless, it was used to enable a full-text search of a number of reports that aren't commonly discovered in established scientific databases like Scopus.Google Scholar is more than just an article citation index; it also lists papers from a variety of commercial publisher websites, institutional repositories and databases, as well as reporting citation checks based on its ordered publications (Kousha & Therwall, 2019).The keyword searches in IEEE Explorer were also not permitted.
All in all, the study of the chosen scientific databases brought about 878 papers, including 67 publications in Science Direct (there were 11 review articles, 49 research articles, 4 encyclopaedias and 3 book chapters), 573 articles in Google Scholar, 19 scientific papers in IEEE Xplore, 72 in Emerald and 147 in WoS using the keywords: "sustainable supply chain management", "construction", "sustainability indicators", appropriate for a starting screening analysis.Books, conference proceedings, and papers were examined in order to refine the findings of prior investigations.The scientific papers written in English and met searching keywords and criteria such as accessibility to the authors of this article.With the goal of this study, the significance of scientific publications published between early 2017 and the end of 2021 was analyzed and discussed.
116 different scientific papers passed the initial screening (Table 1).The reduction in publications fulfilling the criterion, relevance to this study, article release time and duplication to other databases may all be explained by using full-text keyword searches.Following that, the articles were scanned from the beginning to end and those that did not meet the requirements were deleted.Finally, 95 scientific publications suitable for this study's examination were left for the final evaluation.

Reporting findings and knowledge dissemination
The description of the review process, precise results and further methodologies are in the segments of this paper below.The following is a list of the countries that contrib-uted to the papers, as well as the number of publications per year and the methods used in relevant studies.The review is accompanied by a discussion of appropriate articles that demonstrate the construction sector's peculiarity in SSCM.

Findings
2.1.Methodologies found in the scientific articles selected for the review Six methodological approaches were found in the research of scientific papers about the implementation of SSCM in the construction sector, which were chosen for this literature review.The most common methodological approaches used in the scientific articles were case study (29 articles examined), review (25 articles), conceptual (18 articles), survey (12 articles), prototype (9 articles) and interview (2 articles).
According to the findings of the published studies, empirical research is quite widespread.Primary data acquired through surveys, interviews and case studies is widely used in the scientific investigations.Surveys and interviews were used to examine the perspectives of the deployment of sustainable technologies and system attributes such as usability, efficiency, cost and simplicity of use.Theoretical investigations in this review article comprise several literature evaluations as well as conceptual recommendations.These studies largely focused on the core ideas of the supply chain management and technical implementation in the construction industry.Some studies examined the possibilities of new technologies, AI implementations such as IoT and blockchain (Park & Li, 2021), in tracing and tracking supply chains in the construction and logistics industries.The scientific papers picked for this research (95) were examined in three different forms of classification of SSCM: 1) the 4-area classification (Figure 1), 2) the Triple Bottom Line of social, environmental and economic indicators and, finally, 3) the different coloured clusters identified using VOSviewer.

Publications by year
The study was carried out in late December of 2021.Despite the fact that the number of scientific papers on SSCM has continuously and rapidly increased and devel- oped until now, the Figure 2 below shows that the research on SSCM applications in the construction sector has decreased in 2019 and since then the amount is growing rapidly until the end of 2021.As shown in the graph, the number of research chosen for the review includes a significant number of research on SSCM use in construction in 2020.The amount of the published studies peaked in 2021.It should be mentioned that SSCM in the construction industry released the fewest research in 2019.In 2020, there was a considerable increase in the adoption of sustainable supply chain management towards building (20 scientific articles), which increased noticeably in the first and second quarter of 2021.This interest can be related to sustainability (Berardi, 2013), life cycle assessment (Wu et al., 2020), green construction waste disposal (Aslam et al., 2020), logistics (Dubois et al., 2019), collaborative project delivery (Engebø et al., 2020), new building rules and supply chain management domains (Pero et al., 2017).
Implementation of smart technologies and automating sustainable supply chains is critical to optimise construction processes and logistics and increase operational efficiency, allowing for more sustainable building processes to be in use.Efficient uses of SSCM in other industries such as logistics and food, present significant prospects for the construction industry.While SSCM is a well-studied field, terminology and conclusions are continually evolving.As a result, there is a non-negotiable gap between SSCM and its application in the construction business, necessitating more investigation.

Publications by country
Figure 3 shows a summary of scientific publications by country and the number of articles published in each region.Furthermore, analysing the distribution of publications depending on the geographical location of the initial author's research institution demonstrates the diversity of nations.Asia and Europe, according to the research, were the key sources of information on the issue, accounting for 62% of the total number of papers gathered.India is the global leader in the SSCM research in building business (13 articles selected for further examination).USA and China are ranked second and third in terms of the number of articles ( 8) that implement SSCM in construction.The UK came in the fourth place with six articles.It appears that these three mega-countries were particularly interested in adopting sustainability, optimising supply chains and using them in the building industry.
Investigating scientific papers by continent (Figure 4), Asian researchers contributed the most to the research and did 46% of the examined publications, European researchers contributed to 26%, North American 13% of the examined scientific papers.The continental dispersion of scientific research indicates that the concentration of SSCM in the construction sector was the most examined by Asian scientists.

Bibliometric analysis of SSCM in construction
A total of 95 scientific papers were analysed utilising bibliometric approaches and data analysis technology known as keyword co-occurrence and co-citation analysis of publications (Wang et al., 2013).Many scientific publications employ a scientific data mining approach of keyword cooccurrence to indicate current research topics or fields of study.The term "co-occurrence method" is used to show a strong link between several publications on comparable topics.It investigates and identifies the intellectual struc-ture, dynamics, and societal changes linked to a specific issue (Lu et al., 2015).In this study, an open-source software tool called VOSviewer was used to visualise the bibliometric data of scientific papers selected from various journals and scientific databases on the topic of sustainable supply chain management in construction.VOSviewer provides a rigorous functional framework for co-occurrence and co-citation analysis and assists in interpreting bibliometric network schematic representations.In this study's bibliometric analysis, a node was represented by a term or an academic publication.
The authors used a keyword co-occurrence network analysis (KCN) to map future investigations.Whereas a co-citation network examines the structure of logical communication by analysing joins between citations in articles, a keyword co-occurrence network (KCN) examines the information components and structure of a scientific/ technical field by analysing links between links catchphrases in writing (Radhakrishnan et al., 2017).
The VOSviewer tool was utilised to generate a comprehensive term co-occurrence network in this work's descriptive analysis.Keywords are a quick and easy way to describe the subject of a research paper.A network map of keywords aids in visualising the knowledge structure of a certain study topic, revealing emergent elements, and displaying the dynamics of the knowledge structure.Consequently, a keyword co-occurrence network with at least five occurrences was generated, as shown in Figure 5. Figure 5 shows a network made up of nodes and edges, with nodes representing keywords and connections showing keyword co-occurrences found in the research articles.The node's radius corresponds to the recurrence of a keyword or its co-occurrence rate.The keywords that appeared most frequently were "sustainable development", "circular economy", "framework", "stakeholder", "government", "waste", "efficiency", "implication".The primary sustainable supply chain management in the construction study field is visualised in Figure 5, with phrases that commonly appear together being close to each other.These words had the highest frequencies and were the most used keywords.Figure 5 provides the visualisation of regularly used keywords commonly found together or in the same sentence.
Keyword recurrence and linkage may be determined using node sizes, distance between nodes, and keyword connection lines.The size of a node in the network represents its weight, whereas the distance between nodes reflects their connectivity (Lu et al., 2015).Words with similar colours belong to the same cluster, implying that terms in the same cluster are more closely connected.As a consequence, three distinct clusters were formed, as seen in Figure 5. Three distinct clusters were formed, each with its own colour showing how the terms were classified.Words in the red cluster included: "sustainable development", "supplier", "energy", "government", "waste" and "contractor".These themes highlight the development of a subject of study that can profit from sustainability and the future of construction enterprises.The blue cluster includes terms such as "green supply chain", "circular economy", "barrier" and "adoption", and can be related to the significance of research in supply chain management with an emphasis on green logistics, transparency.The green cluster highlights the construction company's leading position, the need of applying new technologies in construction, and the necessity to further investigate sustainable supply chain management in the construction sector.Keywords include "stakeholder", "practitioner", "concept", "framework", "implication" and "future research".

Discussion and future research agenda
The current academic literature reveals diverse possibilities and challenges for applying sustainability in construction supply chain management, such as better traceability, general efficiency, logistics management, and authentication and certification systems (Sertyesilisik, 2017).

Challenges and barriers of SSCM in construction
Several issues of sustainable supply chain management were identified in the construction business while executing the evaluation.Some researchers focused on social challenges such as social pressure from high pollution and high energy consumption (Liu et al., 2018), inefficient storage policies (Nantee & Sureeyatanapas, 2021), compli-cations in applying sustainability approaches due to high skill, data and time requirements (Pande & Adil, 2022), construction companies limiting sustainability merely through public communication (Fracarolli Nunes & Lee Park, 2017) and lack of information (Popović et al., 2017).
The other group of authors stressed the economic aspect of the sustainability problem: inefficiency in the logistics system and lack of cash (Martins et al., 2021).Difficulties in combining the demand for faster economic expansion with sustainability are key issues in emerging countries (Araújo et al., 2020), pushed by increasing stakeholder and social demands, construction firms and supply chains face multidimensional problems that include not only integrating economic goals (Bastas & Liyanage, 2018a), but also a shortage of circular economy enterprises in the construction sector (Hossain et al., 2020).
The third group of researchers focused on the environmental aspects of sustainable supply chain management challenges, such as: increasing carbon footprint (Toufani et al., 2018), environmental problems in demolition processes (Tseng et al., 2021), warehouses as major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions (Bartolini et al., 2019), and steelmaking industries that deplete energy and natural resources (Aghelie, 2020).Table 2 provides the complete SSCM difficulties derived from the reviewed articles.

Potentials of SSCM in construction
Table 3 show the same three sustainability groups of future potential while analysing the problems discovered in scholarly studies regarding SSCM in the construction sector.
Some examples of social potential include the need to emphasise smart warehouse management and smart production systems (Bag et al., 2018), the inability of new companies to rely solely on their own strengths and the need to communicate with other branches of a supply chain (Jiang & Cao, 2021), the transition of logistics transportation systems from manual to e-supply chains (Ying, 2021), the implementation of Industry 4.0 technology, AI and Blockchain technology (big data analytics powered AI) (Bastas & Liyanage, 2019).
The following are some of the most prevalent ideas when it comes to environmental potentials: to improve pollution emission control capabilities and increase investment in energy conservation and emission reduction technologies to drive sustainable development (Kaufman & Ülkü, 2018;Hsu et al., 2019;Aslam et al., 2020), to use top-ranked sustainability indicators such as natural resource management, energy, greenhouse gas emissions and social investment (Kumar & Ramesh, 2020), to use environmental sustainability enablers for the steel industry (Goyal et al., 2018), strong green supply chain relations are the result of effectively implementing Green Manufacturing rather than a driver of the other enablers (Ghadimi et al., 2021).

2020
The results imply that the efficiency of the insurance mechanism is not reliant on alignment across sustainability parameters, which adds to the study of sustainability tradeoffs in supply chain contexts (i.e., social responsibility attenuating social irresponsibility).
Building supply chain management could be reshaped by digitalisation, such as blockchain technology.The blockchain platform uses distributed ledger technology to create a digital system and database to track transactions throughout the supply chain.The supply chain management is made more transparent, reliable, traceable, and efficient thanks to this decentralised database of transactions RQ47: What is the role of digital technologies (Such as Blockchain) in the efficiency of the construction sector?

2020
The complex interrelated structure of many influencing factors may be modelled using cause and effect feedback loops for the construction sector, and the qualitative model of social sustainability can be developed using the System dynamic approach RQ48: How can cause and effect/ feedback-based systems develop social sustainability metrics in building firms?
Bag and Pretorius 2020 Adoption of Industry 4.0 technology (big data analytics driven AI) can have a favourable impact on the capabilities of sustainable manufacturing and circular economy in construction industry RQ49: How Industry 4.0 can impact the sustainable outcomes of the construction sector?Biuki et al. 2020 To assist in the development of a construction sustainable supply chain, an issue might be phrased as a multiobjective mixed integer programming model after finding more sustainable-oriented providers.A couple of different challenges, such as sustainability, integrated decision-making on location, routing, and inventory control planning, and real-world assumptions, can be handled using the two-phase approach to achieve additional advancements in both research and practice RQ50: What digital decisionmaking tools can lead to SSCM in the construction sector?
Jiang and Cao 2021 New initiatives cannot gain a competitive advantage in the market by depending solely on their own strength and resources, and this might even threaten the survival of construction businesses RQ51: How to strengthen emerging initiatives to offer a competitive advantage?End of Table 3 Several conservative possibilities of SSCM in development: a need for monetary help from the public authority due to the COVID-19 pandemic to facilitate the shock for individuals in the construction production network (Karmaker et al., 2021), to contribute assets to digitalisation, for example, blockchain innovation (Fracarolli Nunes et al., 2020), in the activity and maintenance stages, to invest additional resources in the development of more examinations (Lima et al., 2021), a flow absence of monetary help, and practical perspectives such as proximity to the waste assortment point (Kumar & Ramesh, 2020).Henao et al. (2019) summarised the potential of sustainable construction supply chain management into one category: increasing awareness of sustainability.The Triple Bottom Line approach requires an integral performance based on three main goals: economic growth, environmental preservation and social responsibility.

Research agenda
Traditional SSCM in the construction industry faces challenges throughout the supply chain.This includes a stakeholder's unwillingness of the stakeholder to change, excessive waste, theft, late deliveries can cause delays, as well as other unanticipated complications, before construction materials arrive at their destination.
Few studies have investigated the usefulness of sustainability theory in the traceability of construction SCM (Balaman, 2019).Studies that demonstrate how artificial intelligence strengthens the Triple Bottom Line idea (Amarah & Langston, 2017;Henao et al., 2019) in SSCM must propose prototypes and methods to control construction waste management and the use of sustainable resources in supply chains.In addition, it is necessary to investigate how AI-based traceability systems affect inventory, transportation, and distribution decisions in the SSCM at every stage of the construction process.New tools are required to count the resources required to establish successful sustainable and green construction methods.When talking about efficiency, it is important to mention that there are few studies that emphasize sustainability as a significant enabler for SCM alignment, collaboration, and synchronization.There is a scarcity of research on the viability of green solutions to improve the efficiency of SSCM activities (e.g., logistics, warehousing, distribution, and transportation).
There is a need to introduce AI-based analytical tools (Bag et al., 2018) and methodologies for the detection of frauds and the authentication of sustainable construction materials and procedures in a timely, cost-effective and efficient manner.Some technologies such as IoT, Blockchain, and advanced analytics could be used for research that evaluates user perceptions and intentions to use sustainability in conjunction in construction supply chains using technology adoption theories (for example, technology adoption model, diffusion of innovation).To effectively govern cross-border and globalised SSCM, regulatory support and strategies aimed at increased standardisation are required.
The potentials and challenges brought up some research questions for the future.Some of the main questions that emerged from the challenges were: -RQ2: How SSCM can contribute to the quantification of material efficiency?-RQ6: What are the indicators of social sustainability in the construction sector? -RQ11: How AI technology can boost the performance of SSCM in the construction sector? -RQ20: How can sustainable services and product design be adopted from other industries to construction industries?-RQ26: How can TBL's concept of global competitiveness be introduced in the construction sector?Some of the examples of the research questions that emerged from the potentials found in the articles were: -RQ40: How can green, Lean and Six Sigma be integrated into supply chain management?-RQ47: What is the role of digital technologies (such as Blockchain) in the efficiency of the construction sector? -RQ52: What are the parameters of selecting transport variables to reduce environmental degradation?-RQ57: How can stakeholders of a supply chain help deal with the impact of pandemic type situations?Not all of them are the same equal weight, so their importance should be examined in the future researches.These and many more questions found from this research need answers and huge potential for the future can be seen.

Conclusions
The current study examines the function of sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) in the construction industry in depth and includes bibliometric analysis.The SLR is based on 95 articles culled from a variety of web databases.Bibliometric analysis provided a comprehensive picture of prominent nations, continents, trending publishing years and other network indicators.A research outcome framework is also included in Figure 6 to summarise the entire investigation.
Using a systematic literature review (SLR), an examination of the barriers and potentials of SSCM in the construction sector demonstrated that authors from all over the world have addressed various elements of this issue.In the Brundtland Convention, three main components were observed: economic, social, and environmental, often known as a Triple Bottom Line (Henao et al., 2019;Kumar & Ramesh, 2020;Literal & Guhao, 2021).Moreover, some scientists have suggested that a new research agenda for sustainability indicators should be established (Popović et al., 2017;Fetter, 2019;Tetteh et al., 2019;Suhi et al., 2019;Azevedo et al., 2020).
Using VOSviewer three main clusters were found with the common keywords in all of the research papers picked for this article.
A clear and comprehensive understanding of contextspecific core concepts and practises underpinning SCM is recognised as critical to supporting SCM integration in the construction sector.On the other hand, studies continue to focus on restricted subject topics and fail to provide a holistic answer.This paper addressed this research gap by doing a thorough literature assessment.A complicated process was applied to obtain 95 relevant publications from several and widely used databases.These publication dates, article study fields, locations, and keyword Figure 6.Research outcome framework co-occurrence were all statistically analysed.The whole spectrum of viewpoints and contributions from different research fields were explored to capture the established essential concepts and practises underlying SCM in the construction industry, going beyond the scope of the study.
There were identified several social challenges of the SSCM in construction, such as social pressure of high pollution and high energy consumption (Leseure & Alexander, 2017;Liu et al., 2018), inefficient strategies of warehousing policies (Nantee & Sureeyatanapas, 2021), complications to apply sustainability approaches for reasons such as high amount of skill, data and time requirements (Pande & Adil, 2022), construction company restraints sustainability merely on their public communication (Fracarolli Nunes & Lee Park, 2017), lack of information and lack of appropriate indicators (Popović et al., 2017).
Another group of authors highlighted the economic component of the sustainability problem: lack of efficiency in logistics systems and insufficient funds (Martins et al., 2021), difficulties in reconciling the need for accelerated economic growth with sustainability are significant dilemmas in developing countries (Araújo et al., 2020), driven by increasing stakeholder and societal pressures, construction companies and construction supply chains face multidimensional challenges (Bastas & Liyanage, 2018a).
Furthermore, the third group of sustainability challenges of SSCM in construction was extracted.The third group of researchers focused on the environmental aspects of sustainable supply chain management challenges, such as: increasing carbon footprint (Toufani et al., 2018), environmental problems in demolition processes (Tseng et al., 2021), warehouses being a main subject of greenhouse gas emission contributors (Bartolini et al., 2019), steelmaking industries depleting energy and natural resources (Koh et al., 2017;Aghelie, 2020).
The results unveiled that sustainable supply chain management offers three groups major potentials for the construction sector anywhere in the world.Some of the social potential examples could be the need to emphasise on smart warehouse management and smart production systems (Bag et al., 2018), new ventures inability to rely only on their own strengths, and a need to communicate with other branches of a supply chain (Jiang & Cao, 2021), move logistics transportation systems from manual work to e-supply chains (Ying, 2021), implement Industry 4.0 technology (big data analytics powered artificial intelligence) adoption (Bag & Pretorius, 2020), a potential integration of Lean, green and Six Sigma approaches (Bastas & Liyanage, 2019) could be included into the social group.
Environmental potentials can be imagined as enhancement of pollution emission control capabilities and increase investment in energy conservation and emission reduction technologies to drive sustainable development (Hashmi & Choudhury, 2020;Aslam et al., 2020), use topranked sustainability indicators including the management of natural resources, energy, greenhouse gas emissions and social investment (Kumar & Ramesh, 2020), use environ-mental sustainability enablers for steel industry (Goyal et al., 2018), strong green supply chain relations are the outcome of successfully implementing green manufacturing and not a driver of the other enablers (Ghadimi et al., 2021).
Examples of some economical potential of SSCM in construction contain a need of financial support from the government because of COVID-19 pandemic to ease the shock for the members of construction supply chain (Karmaker et al., 2021), invest funds to the digitalisation of construction processes, such as blockchain technology (Fracarolli Nunes et al., 2020), invest in the development of more studies on operation and maintenance stages (Lima et al., 2021), a current lack of financial support; economical aspects like proximity to the waste collection point (Kumar & Ramesh, 2020).
The Triple Bottom Line approach requires an integral performance based on three main goals: economic growth, environmental preservation and social responsibility.
The extraction of challenges and potentials in existing scientific literature brought up an idea to find the Research Questions.There were 59 research questions developed as a result of this research and current literature of SSCM in construction sector.Some of the examples of them are: How GM can affect the supply chain relationship in different country contexts, what are the most important sustainability indicators of the building supply chain; which elements of sustainability affect the sustainability performance of construction logistics and etc.These 59 research questions are not equal importance, so future investigation is needed to determine which of these are the most significant.The questionnaire for the experts of the construction sector could be made in order to find the essential questions.

Limitations
According to current academic research, there are several opportunities and challenges for incorporating sustainability into construction supply chain management.Better traceability, general efficiency, logistics management, and authentication and certification systems are among the former.Modern technology can help achieve important supply chain quality criteria like traceability and verification and green consumption and waste reduction in the construction industry.This necessitates regulators having a thorough grasp of the underlying technology and how it impacts and produces current value networks.
The limits of technology, especially consumers' reluctance to adapt, must be better understood.The current legal framework does not fully account for the unique characteristics of AI-based technologies, which is one of the key levers for policymakers to create a regulatory environment that accounts for modern technology's capabilities as well as the expectations of an ever-growing need in the new era of construction and logistics (Banihashemi et al., 2019).
This study aims to add to the academic literature on sustainable supply chain management in the construction industry.It offers a systematic analysis of current ideas about the use of new technologies and efficient logistics in construction and a summary of potential opportunities and significant limitations.
The study's findings can help stakeholders understand the variables that promote and inhibit SSCM adoption in the construction industry and alter their policies and operations as a result.The findings, however, are constrained by the databases used, and hence may not fully cover all published literature on emerging technologies relevant to building research.Additional research could widen the search terms and look at more scientific resources.More empirical studies are needed to fulfil the study agenda provided in this work, which will give sustainable construction researchers, policymakers, and managers with improved insights into the economic and organisational effects of innovative and efficient technologies in this sector.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Stages of systematic literature of SSCM in construction industry (compiled by the author using PRISMA method)

Figure 2 .Figure 3 .
Figure 2. Year-wise distribution of research on SSCM in construction

Figure 4 .Figure 5 .
Figure 4. Number of articles from each continent

Table 1 .
Databases and number of scientific papers, selected for the review

Table 2 .
Future research questions emerge from challenges and barriers of SSCM in construction

Table 3 .
Future research questions emerge from the potentials of SSCM in construction