Requirements for Sustainable Industrial Facilities: A Systematic Review and Traceable Evidence-Mapped Requirements Framework

Abstract

Industrial facilities combine production-driven loads, large-span structures, specialised environmental control, safety constraints and frequent process reconfiguration, limiting the direct transfer of generic green-building criteria. This PRISMA 2020 systematic review identifies, appraises and synthesises sustainability requirements for industrial facilities and develops a traceable evidence-mapped framework. An expanded Scopus rerun yielded 1238 records, of which 1138 unmatched records underwent title–abstract screening; 370 additional reports advanced to full text. After reconciliation with the historical retrieval pool, 500 unique reports were sought, 97 were not retrieved, 403 were assessed, 41 were excluded and 362 publications were eligible. The final corpus comprises 324 primary and 38 contextual publications. Methodological confidence was high for 291 publications, moderate for 64 and low for 7. The final evidence map contains 1024 retained requirement-publication links, including 902 empirical DQ/AQ links and 122 operationalisation-only OC links, producing 2590 empirical weighted-evidence points (WES). Of 24 requirements, 20 are Established, three Supported and one Emerging. Water stewardship remains the least evidenced domain; WS2 is the only Emerging requirement. Across 324 leave-one-out iterations, no requirement changed tier, and the Spearman rank correlations ranged from 0.993 to 1.000. Only WS1 showed sensitivity to one proportionally rescaled confidence specification and to the 3 × 3 threshold grid; no tier changed under low-confidence exclusion, non-final-source exclusion or AQ attenuation. IFSRF is, therefore, presented as an evidence-informed and analytically stress-tested framework, not as a validated certification instrument.