Digital material passports in the AEC industry: a scoping review and conceptualisation of future research challenges

Material passports (MPs) are datasets designed to track and manage building elements’ lifecycles, including the documentation of provenance, location, or disassembly information. The last few years have seen a growth in MPs development, catalysed by international, national, and regional directives on decarbonisation, data transparency, product labelling, and the need to rethink the reporting of sustainability metrics in the built environment. Recent MP prototypes, however, encompass multiple data architectures and have been implemented across various building typologies, regulatory jurisdictions, and construction processes, resulting in unclear adoption pathways in industry. In response to this challenge, this paper maps this emerging field using a scoping review methodology. It presents an analysis of a literature database (n = 83) to identify the core characteristics of the field (such as co-authorship networks) and codifies future implementation challenges to facilitate the adoption of MPs in industry. Results indicate that MPs constitute a fast-moving field with numerous gaps for successful implementation, including technical challenges for further development, as well as broader multi-disciplinary challenges in areas such as socio-cultural organisation studies in industry, professional curriculum design, and policy.