FRAMEWORKS FOR MITIGATING SUPPLY CHAIN DISRUPTIONS AND MATERIAL PRICE VOLATILITY IN SUSTAINABLE BUILDING CONSTRUCTION

Abstract

The sustainable building construction sector faces compounding vulnerabilities from globally interconnected supply chains, in which material price volatility, geopolitical disruptions, and sustainability certification requirements converge to impose substantial cost overruns and schedule delays. Industry data consistently indicate that 62–74% of sustainable construction projects experience material-related budget deviations exceeding 12%, with lead-time uncertainty for certified low-carbon materials extending 40–60% beyond conventional substitutes. This paper introduces the Supply Chain Mitigation and Resilience (SC-MR) Framework, an integrated architecture combining ensemble machine learning price forecasting, dynamic multi-tier supplier diversification, real-time disruption monitoring, and sustainability-aligned procurement orchestration. SC-MR models the joint distribution of commodity price trajectories, geopolitical risk indices, supplier capacity signals, and certification-compliance constraints through a gradient-boosted ensemble augmented by a demand-adjusted temporal correction layer. Agent-based discrete-event simulations across 120 projects and 18 material categories demonstrate: Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) of 4.8% for 4-week price forecasts; on-time material delivery improvement from 61.2% to 91.3%; budget cost deviation reduction from 18.4% to 4.1%; and a 34.6% reduction in embodied carbon attributable to substitution guidance. SC-MR achieves these performance gains while maintaining full alignment with LEED v4.1, BREEAM 2018, and EDGE certification requirements, establishing the first integrated supply-chain resilience architecture validated across sustainability-certified construction contexts.