A review of sustainable facility management research

Abstract

Sustainable facility management (SFM) has a positive effect on the three main pillars of sustainable buildings: economic, environmental, and social benefits, thereby adding value to companies, organizations, and governments that integrate SFM into their vision. This paper presents a review of SFM publications, developing a framework for identifying areas of concern regarding SFM systems, as well as identifying and studying research gaps and limitations in the existing body of knowledge. Abstracts from 232 peer-reviewed journal publications from 2007 to 2016 were analyzed according to research discipline, topic studied, and methods used. This analysis suggests that the body of academic knowledge about SFM has reached a certain maturity, and that various research disciplines have contributed to the field from different viewpoints using diverse methods, demonstrating that the SFM research field is an interdisciplinary field. This review demonstrates that the number of SFM publications has decreased over time starting from 2012 until 2016, compared with the highest number of published papers (36) in 2011. This indicates that academic interest in SFM is now driven more by an interest in empirical phenomena rather than SFM as a new research discipline.