Synergies in Off-Site Construction, Sustainability, and Supply Chains

Dear Colleagues,

Aim and Scope

This Special Issue examines the critical synergies between off-site construction (OSC), sustainability, and supply chain performance across multiple sectors, including healthcare, energy, industrial manufacturing, residential, commercial, logistics, and other infrastructure. Examples include disaster-induced response and reconstruction. As OSC continues to evolve as a transformative construction approach, it offers significant potential to address urgent global challenges, including climate change, rapid emergency/disaster response, resource scarcity, housing shortages, speed of construction, construction quality, construction waste, and workforce limitations. Despite the demonstrated success of OSC, many operational challenges remain with OSC, such as environmental performance issues, regulatory complexity, supply chain fragmentation, procurement complexity, adaptability issues, and quality control issues that continue to limit its widespread and effective adoption. These challenges have led to a fundamental problem in diverse sectors, such as healthcare systems, industrial facilities, in how they leverage OSC to manage their resilience, supply chain performance, and environmental, social, and economic sustainability targets.

Against this backdrop, the aim of this Special Issue is to explore how OSC strategies can advance the delivery of the built environment facilities while strengthening the potential for environmental, social, and economic sustainability, supply chain resilience and agility, rapid deployment solutions for emergency and post-disaster scenarios, and resilience in the built environment itself and beyond. Also, there is a need to demonstrate how knowledge transfer from other industrialized sectors can accelerate innovation in OSC practices. Further emphasis is placed on understanding how the use of digital technologies and circular economy principles in OSC can enhance life cycle performance, standardization, and long-term adaptability. Thus, by drawing insights from multiple sectors, this Special Issue encourages contributions that position OSC as a catalyst for systemic change across diverse sectors through sustainable and resilient infrastructure development and sustainable supply chain transformation.

Key Topics and Submission Areas

We invite original research that addresses, but is not limited to, the following themes:

• OSC adoption trends and decision-making;
• Multi-sector applications of OSC for disaster response and rapid deployment;
• Supply chain resilience, risk management, and logistics optimization in OSC;
• Life cycle assessments, embodied carbon, sustainability, and circular economy in OSC;
• Adoption of digital technologies, including BIM, digital twins, AI, IoT, and smart manufacturing in OSC;
• Adaptable and flexible OSC designs, sustainable materials, and design for disassembly;
• Business models, procurement, regulations, quality control, and certification in OSC;
• Workforce development, training, labour transition, and health and safety in OSC.

This collection will provide critical insights for practitioners, policymakers, and sector leaders to drive innovation and systemic improvement in construction practices.

Dr. Roshani Palliyaguru
Dr. Jackie Yang
Dr. Kalpani Dissanayake
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Buildings is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• off-site construction (OSC)
• modular construction
• resilience
• sustainability
• digital twins
• supply chain agility
• circular economy
• disasters/emergencies