BIM and blockchain; a decentralized solution for a change management workflow in construction projects

There is a big potential for process optimizations, due to the digitalization gap in the construction business. New digital technologies, as the Building Information Modelling (BIM), are increasingly being adapted by the stakeholders in this area. On the other hand, blockchain is a very new and innovative technology domain which has grown immensely in the last several years, and where people are now trying to find the right use-cases. Especially, the even newer field of smart contract development has opened the door for a large amount of possible applications, where it is neither clear if these can actually be implemented as envisioned, nor if there is even a need for a decentralized solution at all. In a construction project, changes on BIM models are only to be approved by the appropriate stakeholder. Therefore, we have combined the BIM models, which are stored using a Git repository, with a release management workflow, which is realised as a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain.This enables the workflow to be transparent, traceable and its results to be immutable. The goal of this work is to create a prototype and compare it to other (off-chain) solutions and to evaluate if an application of a combination of BIM and blockchain yields an advantage in terms of costs and security.