Use of blockchain 
for enabling 
Construction 4.0

AUBEA Conference 2019, 2019

Blockchain was introduced as the underlying technology to enable cryptocurrency transactions among untrusted parties. Today, its transformative potential is often compared to that of the World Wide Web, and both practitioners and researchers across all domains are exploring how to utilise blockchain technology to address long-standing problems around data integrity, transparency, and trust. A significant number of research and case study findings indicate many industries are already exploring the diverse benefits of blockchain technology. Analysis of how other industries adopt blockchain could help to understand how to solve similar types of problems in the construction industry. This paper critically analyses the potential to use blockchain in the construction industry. Research findings show that the blockchain technology and its capabilities are mature enough to support many use cases in the construction industry, and the industry's inertia in adopting new technologies seems to be the only hurdle. Two major sectors where blockchain technology could have a greater and immediate impact include the building information modelling and supply chain management.

Exploring the Potential of Blockchain Technology in the Construction Industry: Applications and Implications, 2023

Blockchain was presented as the underlying technology for digital currencies between untrustworthy parties. Today, its transformative potential is constantly compared to that of the Web, and practitioners and researchers from all domains are investigating how to use blockchain technology to deal with long-standing issues related to data integrity, transparency, and trust. Many studies and case study findings suggest that many industries are already investigating the numerous benefits of blockchain technology. An examination of how other industries use blockchain could aid in understanding how to fix similar problems in the construction industry. This paper examines the feasibility of using blockchain in the construction sector. According to the study results, block chain and its abilities are developed enough then to endorse many use cases in the construction sector, and the industry's resistance to new technologies being adopted appears to be the only barrier. Building information modeling and supply chain management (SCM) are two significant areas where blockchain technology might have a larger & immediate effect.

Journal of Industrial Information Integration, 2020

The dawn of the 21st century has seen the advent of many technologies targeting commercial and financial sectors. These include Big Data, Internet of Things and FinTechs such as blockchain. Blockchain is a type of a distributed database that is used to replicate, share, and synchronise data spread across different geographical locations such as multiple sites, countries, or organisations. The main property of blockchain is that there is no central administrator or centralised data storage mechanism. Consensus algorithms govern the peer-to-peer decentralised network. Numerous benefits and applications of blockchains have resulted in it becoming popular among a broad spectrum of businesses, but is it the case in the construction industry? Given, the backward nature of the construction industry in digitalisation and its reticence to change it becomes important to analyse the potential impact of Blockchains as a potential disruptive technology. Although there exists a significant research gap and the potential possibility to test blockchain in the construction sector, the construction industry is historically reported as the second lowest sector to have adopted information technology. This leads to a conundrum whether blockchain is a pure technological hype or whether there is a real potential application in construction. The paper is aimed at critically analysing the application potential of blockchains in construction through a use case analysis and comprehensive literature review to resolve whether it is pure hype or real. The exploration revealed that due to the exponential uses of blockchain, investments involved, and a number of start-up businesses contributing to Industry 4.0, blockchain indeed has a credible potential in the construction industry.

2020

Construction Industry is currently evolving around the world. On the other hand, despite the technological advancement across most sectors, construction industry remains amongst laggards in digitalization. Currently, engineering business is facing technological disruption ahead of the fourth industrial revolution; one of which is the blockchain technology! Blockchain is new to construction industry, its challenges and opportunities are yet to be fully realized. This study explores the challenges and potential opportunities of blockchain in the construction industry through extensive review of literature within the blockchain domain vis-à-vis construction business domain. The study presents challenges under three categories (technical, regulation and social), and the potential opportunities in to improving efficiency and reducing conflict through transparency and trust. That will ultimately create value for money in the procurement of construction works. Recommendations are made based on the study finding to advance the research on blockchain applications in to the construction industry.

Advances in ICT in Design, Construction and Management in Architecture, Engineering, Construction and Operations (AECO): Proceedings of the 36th CIB W78 2019 Conference , 2019

Business and public interest and investments in digital ledgers, smart contracts and virtual currencies such as bitcoin, has skyrocketed. Blockchain is indeed a hyped technology – and should therefore raise healthy skepticism. During construction production, projects and the involved companies take on a disintegrated economic flow and allocation of economic resources; these include supplies of materials and services, payments, accounting tasks, and other economic decisions, that are often treated second-hand by site management, subcontractors, transport companies, retailers and material suppliers. Within such a situation, blockchain technologies can maybe create value for stakeholders in handling this economic flow and integrating it with other information and material flows. So, in this sense, blockchain represents a hope for construction; however, this paper critically scrutinizes blockchain for construction, in trying to answer the question whether it indeed constitutes hope, or it is harmful. The paper will report from an ongoing study and development project aiming at implementing a blockchain prototype for digitalized construction logistics at a large building site. A literature review, undertaken in several iterations from May 2018 to summer 2019 and following the emergence of the hype for blockchain, reveals visions and a few prototypes of related systems for construction. Theoretically, the paper adopts a sociomaterial approach, appreciating that blockchain is as much about social interaction and development of trust, as it is about digitally facilitating economic transactions. Several critical issues threatening to jeopardize the adoption of blockchain are analyzed in the paper, such as the protection of the economic data during transactions, permission access control which only allows a few people to enter the system while still requiring a minimum of trust between those already inside the system, and possible financial speculation on the utilized cryptocurrencies. The way construction stakeholders can mitigate such issues, thus enabling blockchain to become a realized hope rather than harming the sector, is discussed. Probably the largest risk relates to unrealistic hopes of full transparency in open blockchain systems, potentially making the systems too vulnerable to external intervention and even speculation. Permissioned systems with some level of hierarchy appear to be a feasible compromise solution mitigating the potential harm.

Springer eBooks, 2022

Carbon emissions are categorised as Embodied Carbon (EC) occurring in the production phase and Operational Carbon (OC) occurring in the operational phase of buildings. The current focus on producing zero-carbon buildings, emphasises reducing OC and ignores the importance of reducing EC emissions. This study focuses on EC. Methods available in EC estimating currently produce estimates that often do not complement each other. This makes it important to develop a robust and accurate methodology for estimating EC. Blockchain is an emerging technology that has significant potential for transaction processing in supply chains. The construction industry being the second least digitalised industry, the adoption of innovative technologies is predominantly important. This paper explores the potential application of blockchain for accurate estimation of EC in construction supply chains. A detailed literature review and expert interviews revealed that, compared to traditional information systems, blockchain systems could eliminate issues in EC estimating highlighting its potential credible application for EC estimating. Scalability was identified as a feature that was lacking in a blockchain system, however, for EC estimating, its impact was identified as minimal. It will be difficult to generalise the findings of the study due to interview based qualitative methodology adopted in this study along with the fact that blockchain is an emerging and fairly new technology. However, a similar process could be followed by other studies to compare blockchain with traditional information systems, to evaluate the suitability of blockchain technology to develop prototype systems.

IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering

Today, the Blockchain Technology has been widely explored and continuously revolutionising many sectors around the world, including construction industry. Construction industry need blockchain technology to improve the current limitation of centralised technology in its various project life-cycle. In this paper, we presented literature review, aimed to identify the potentials of Blockchain applications in construction industry. This paper also reviewed the unique features behind the blockchain technology which trigger its capabilities in construction industry. Paper further discussed the implications of the blockchain application if it were adopted in construction industry. In short, Blockchain technology is still relatively new in construction industry and further deep research is needed to develop real life on-hand application for construction industry in near future.

This study specifically set to identify the status and extent of utilization of Blockchain technology in the delivery of construction projects in Imo State, Nigeria. The study was guided by the technology acceptance model (TAM) theory. The study used a descriptive research design method of investigation, and a simple random sampling technique was used to select a sample size of 123 from a population of 194 practitioners using the Krejcie and Morgan's method of sample size determination. The data collection and survey instrument included a well-structured questionnaire, discussions, personal observations and visits to elicit information from respondents/construction project locations. The collected data was presented in the form of frequency distribution, figures, and charts using descriptive statistical tools using IBM SPSS Statistics version 25.0. The study's findings indicate a general low level of utilization/application of Blockchain technology in the delivery of construction projects in Imo state. This is due to the fact that none (0.00%) of the respondents have heard of Blockchain technology as applicable to construction projects-related activities, 9 (10.47%) have used Blockchain technology sparingly, 35 (40.70%) have never heard of Blockchain technology and 42 (48.84%) have heard of Blockchain technology, but never applied it on any construction project-related activity out of the eighty-six (86) responses used for the study. This study recommends that, a united front is needed to make Blockchain technology awareness-raising and encourage practitioners to embrace it. Blockchain can provide a dependable infrastructure for information management throughout all stages of the construction project life cycle as well as secure storage of sensitive sensor data.

Buildings, 2019

Construction customers want more complex facilities delivered faster and at a lower cost. Transaction costs account for a significant proportion of each new or refurbished facility (a 2017 report from the Infrastructure Client Group in the UK suggests as high as 50%), yet they contribute no value to the customer. Blockchain is being suggested as a way to reduce transaction costs by eliminating the need for intermediaries to build trust as a prerequisite for successfully executed agreements. This study first describes the thinking that underpins blockchain technology, outlining how it works, and the potential limitations of the technology. Second, using a case study, reviews the potential cost savings from the use of blockchain for a real estate company. The results reveal a potential cost savings from blockchain deployment at 8.3% of the total cost of residential construction, with a standard deviation of 1.26%. Third, we explore the implications, risks and applications of blockchai...

Procedia Engineering, 2017

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.