Dynamic supply chain vulnerability analysis of hong kong-zhuhai-macao bridge construction: A topic modelling approach

The Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge (HZMB) was a challenging milestone construction project that boosted the Hong Kong construction industry participants to new heights of recognition. While industry-boosting long-term benefits arose from knowledge gained in managing specialist prefabrication processes and complex supply chains (SCs), these advances also necessarily imposed challenges, rendering the project highly vulnerable to disruptions. Therefore, higher resilience was essential to withstand higher Supply Chain Vulnerabilities (SCV) through enhanced capabilities, for which identifying dynamic SCV becomes critical. To address this, the study employed the Topic Over Time modelling approach to detect critical SCV using 1,748 unstructured official documents on the HZMB from 2003 to 2018 (project design to handover). The popularity trend analysis that was thereby conducted, enabled identifying the six most critical vulnerabilities and categorizing them among each project phase. Finally, an ex-post vulnerability evaluation map was developed by considering the vulnerabilities' popularity trend and their relevance towards the project and SC phases. Using these findings, industry practitioners could improve their ex-ante decision-making, targeting value-enhanced-resilient SCs in future prefabricated infrastructure development projects. Further, the text-mining research approach unveils an effective mechanism for researchers to extract dynamic empirical clues from a large unstructured set of documents in construction SCs.