Yingli Wang

The construction industry faces significant challenges regarding material waste and sustainable practices, necessitating innovative solutions that integrate automation, traceability, and decentralised decision-making to enable efficient material reuse. This paper presents a blockchain-enabled digital marketplace for sustainable construction material reuse, ensuring transparency and traceability using InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). The proposed framework enhances trust and accountability in material exchange, addressing key challenges in industrial automation and circular supply chains. A framework has been developed to demonstrate the operational processes of the marketplace, illustrating its practical application and effectiveness. Our contributions show how the marketplace can facilitate the efficient and trustworthy exchange of reusable materials, representing a substantial step towards more sustainable construction practices. The evaluation is conducted on a prototype implementation under controlled conditions to analyse system behaviour and scalability trends, providing initial validation of the proposed approach.

Purpose: Digital product passports (DPPs) are increasingly viewed as a major enabler of circular practices, and regulation mandating their use is being seen across a number of sectors and countries. Construction is one such sector, which is also a huge contributor to waste and carbon emissions. However, the circular transition is a challenging prospect given the complexity and life cycle of structures. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to address the question “How can construction stakeholders transition towards a DPP-enabled circular supply chain?”. Design/methodology/approach: A two-phase design is deployed, combining expert workshops and a case study. The workshops gathered insights from diverse construction supply chain stakeholders to identify barriers, constraints and trade-offs in adopting DPPs. These insights informed the development of eight design principles grounded in SoS. The case study, focused on modular steel-framed healthcare buildings, applied these principles to envision a DPP-enabled circular supply chain. Findings: This study identified a range of barriers and constraints that will need to be overcome, and it also envisions a circular supply chain blueprint based on eight design principles to support a range of DPP-enabled circular routes and pathways. Originality/value: Previous work has shown that the emerging concept of DPP should be considered from a supply chain or systems-of-systems (SoS) perspective, but notes that current guidance and knowledge are in their infancy. The paper contributes by developing and applying eight design principles, anchored in SoS concepts, to support organisations in envisioning their own DPP implementation in pursuit of more circular practices.

1. In today’s fast-changing business environment, supply chains (SCs) are becoming more complex and prone to disruption (Hohenstein et al. 2015; Ponomarov and Holcomb 2009). The Business Continuity...

Digital product passports (DPPs) are emerging as a key instrument for enabling supply chain transparency and supporting circular economy objectives. Yet despite growing regulatory momentum, little is understood about how organisations coordinate the complex information flows that underpin DPP implementation across organisational and technological boundaries. This study addresses that gap by examining how DPP ecosystems are developed and operated from a data-centric perspective. Drawing on a multiple case study of five early-stage DPP implementations in the UK construction sector, we explore what mechanisms organisations use to coordinate information across boundaries, how that coordination evolves, and what this reveals about the limits of existing orchestration theory. Our findings identify three building blocks of information orchestration: technology configuration, data curation and governance, and ecosystem orchestration, as the core mechanisms through which cross-boundary information coordination operates. Each building block harbours a core tension that orchestrators must actively navigate, and the coherence with which these tensions are resolved across building blocks determines the overall informational value of the DPP. These findings motivate the development of the concept of information orchestration.,Theoretically, the study elaborates resource orchestration theory for information-intensive, cross-boundary contexts, where no focal firm controls the full information chain and value emerges from collective rather than directed participation. It also advances a configurational logic showing that orchestration effectiveness depends not on strength in any single domain but on mutual alignment across all three building blocks. Practical implications for DPP implementers and regulatory framework designers are discussed.

1. As the shipping industry becomes increasingly competitive, shipping liners are striving to enhance their operational efficiency to stay competitive. This situation compels supply chain partners ...

Digital twin technology (DTT) creates a virtual replica of a physical object, system, or process and uses real-time data to support monitoring, analysis, and control. Although DTT is increasingly discussed as a means to enhance supply-chain resilience, prior evidence is fragmented and lacks an integrated view across disruption stages. This study conducts a systematic literature review of 89 peer-reviewed articles on DTT and supply-chain resilience, applying relevance-based screening to retain studies with substantive theoretical and practical implications. The review indicates that DTT applications for resilience are emergent but gaining momentum, and that their contribution differs by resilience stage. Specifically, DTT capabilities support preparedness through enhanced visibility, risk sensing, and scenario testing; resistance through real-time monitoring, early warning, and evaluation of mitigation options; rebound through response coordination, recovery planning, and adaptive reconfiguration; and growth through post-disruption learning and network redesign. The synthesis also identifies key barriers to adoption, including data quality limitations, high implementation costs, shortages of specialised skills, and governance challenges, and suggests that integration with complementary digital technologies often enables more advanced functionality. Overall, the study provides a stage-based consolidation of DTT capabilities, benefits, and barriers to guide research and managerial deployment.

The construction industry faces significant challenges regarding material waste and sustainable practices, necessitating innovative solutions that integrate automation, traceability, and decentralised decision-making to enable efficient material reuse. This paper presents a blockchain-enabled digital marketplace for sustainable construction material reuse, ensuring transparency and traceability using InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). The proposed framework enhances trust and accountability in material exchange, addressing key challenges in industrial automation and circular supply chains. A framework has been developed to demonstrate the operational processes of the marketplace, illustrating its practical application and effectiveness. Our contributions show how the marketplace can facilitate the efficient and trustworthy exchange of reusable materials, representing a substantial step towards more sustainable construction practices.