Potentials of Blockchain Technology for Construction Management

By Žiga Turk, Robert Klinc. 2017

429 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Blockchain technology enables distributed, encrypted and secure logging of digital transactions. It is the underlying technology of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Blockchain is expected to revolutionize computing in several areas, particularly where centralization was unnatural and privacy was important. In the paper, we present research on where and how this technology could be useful in the construction industry. The work is based on the study of literature on open issues that exist in construction process management. These are than matched to the capabilities of blockchain. We are motivated by the fact that construction projects involve a dynamic grouping of several companies. We study the degree to which the relationships among them are hierarchical or peer-to-peer and note that particularly in information intensive phases, centralization of information management was necessary because of technology. When using un-constraining technology, communication patterns among participants show a peer-to-peer nature of the relationships. In such environment, blockchain can provide a trustworthy infrastructure for information management during all building life-cycle stages. Even if building information modelling (BIM) is used, which assumes a centralized building information model, there is a role for blockchain to manage information on who did what and when and thus provide a basis for any legal arguments that might occur. On the construction site blockchain can improve the reliability and trustworthiness of construction logbooks, works performed and material quantities recorded. In the facility maintenance phase, blockchain's main potential is the secure storage of sensor data which are sensitive to privacy. We conclude that blockchain provides solutions to many current problems in construction information management. However, it is more likely that it will be built into generic IT infrastructure on top of which construction applications are built, rather than used directly by authors of construction related software. It has a potential to make construction processes less centralized which opens needs for research in that direction.

Subfields: Building and Construction, Geology, Management Science and Operations Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/921f24569bcf47c3743e5bfad6536371deb35fcd

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Citations in the corpus

Integrated digital twin and blockchain framework to support accountable information sharing in construction projects (2021, methodology): “In the construction industry, blockchain has been applied to IoT data security on construction sites for more reliable data transactions [40], information management during building life-cycle stages [41], automated payments [42], and intelligent contracting [43].”
Leveraging the Internet of Things and Blockchain Technology in Supply Chain Management (2019, background): “Equally important‚ the combination of Blockchain technology and IoT provides a reliable infrastructure for improving supply chain information management‚ arranging legal agreements and securing the storage of IoT device identities throughout the product’s life-cycle stages [118].”
Survey on blockchain based smart contracts: Applications, opportunities and challenges (2021, background): “Extensive network traffic X High resource consumption X Construction Management : [233], [234] • Scalability • Establishment of trust through ledger Computational and power limitations X X X X”
Blockchain in the built environment and construction industry: A systematic review, conceptual models and practical use cases (2019, methodology): “The key features of DLT (here characterised by the Bitcoin Blockchain) are: (i) decentralisation operating across a peer-to-peer network made up of computers (known as nodes); (ii) immutability, once blocks are chained; (iii) reliability, given that all nodes have an identical copy of the blockchain”