ENHANCING CONSTRUCTION TRANSPARENCY AND DISPUTE RESOLUTION USING BLOCKCHAIN-BACKED BIM MODELS

Abstract

Blockchain has been on the rise since its advent in 2008 and is finding its way into all kinds of use cases. In civil contracts management, the record keeping of documents is a decades old system which requires storing of information on paper. This paper based information can easily be tampered with and destroyed. Thus, this decades old system provides several loopholes for bad agents to escape from accountability. Since these paper based documents can easily be tampered with, a rigorous system must be put in place to verify the truthfulness of these documents. In usual arbitration proceedings, this is done by allowing both parties to cross-examine the evidence submitted by the party they oppose. This process makes arbitration proceedings all the more cumbersome. Nowadays, new technologies are continuously being adopted in different industries to make processes more efficient, and with much success. Blockchain is one of such technologies, that has caught the world by storm. A blockchain is a way of storing data, such that the data cannot be tampered with and can never be deleted. This property of blockchain has given it opportunities for various uses from banking, medical record keeping, supply chain management, electronic voting, copyright management, etc. In this design project, blockchain has been used to streamline the record keeping process and secure it using the fool-proof immutability of the blockchain. A smart contract has been developed which allows stakeholders of a project to share documents through the blockchain. The smart contract permanently saves the documents on the blockchain and retrieves them on demand. A user-friendly interface was also developed to help users navigate the system. This allows for a tamper-proof storage system which can also be leveraged by the arbitrators to resolve disputes efficiently. The proposed system can reduce record-keeping costs as well as provide novel support for BIM models to be uploaded directly on the blockchain. The developed prototype promises to make the whole process more transparent and efficient.