A scientometric review of system dynamics applications in construction management research

Abstract

Construction management can be regarded as a complex and dynamic system. In recent years, system dynamics (SD) has been widely applied to solve the complex and dynamic problems in the construction management. However, there is a lack of a scientometric analysis to investigate SD applications in construction management from an objective perspective. To fill out this research gap, this study retrieved a total of 222 relevant articles from the Scopus database. Then, VOSviewer was employed to analyze the collected literature from five aspects (i.e., co-authorship, published journals, co-occurring keywords, article citations, and regions). Based on the analysis results, four mainstream research themes were identified and discussed, including "risk management", "waste management", "energy management", and "construction productivity". In addition, future research directions, such as "construction risk allocation in PPP projects", "evaluating the economic feasibility of construction waste landfilling centers", "identifying the variables affecting lighting infrastructure energy consumption", and "assessing construction productivity for technology-intensive activities", were proposed. The contribution of this study lies in that it helps both scholars and practitioners to solve the complex and dynamic problems in construction management.