Designing a Collaborative Construction-Project Platform on Blockchain Technology for Transparency, Traceability, and Information Symmetry
Chibuzor Udokwu, Alex Norta, Christoph Wenna
Abstract
The construction industry is a $6 trillion industry worldwide with a prediction to grow towards $10,3 trillion by 2023 and constitutes an essential part of the global economy. Nevertheless, the management of the construction effort is still very manual. The construction process from design, to sourcing of material, contract management, and so on, is a convoluted and intransparent process filled with risks the collaborating parties are exposed to. A need exists for management platforms that streamline and automate collaborative construction processes, establish transparency, traceability, and information symmetry between business parties. This paper presents the Construction Project Management (CoPM) platform that is based on blockchain- and smart-contract technologies for enabling peer-to-peer collaboration between construction parties that enhances the flow of information for reducing cost- and time expenditures while improving the quality of service. The CoPM system is based on diligent up-front requirement studies from which we derive a coherent system architecture and set of cooperation protocols. Thereby, the CoPM system overcomes the currently existing fractured value propositions for construction-management systems.