BIM and Blockchain-Based Automatic Asset Tracking in Digital Twins for Modular Construction

Asset tracking is increasingly necessary for better management of offsite and onsite construction progress for modular construction projects. Delayed delivery of elements from prefabricated plants would postpone the construction progress, resulting in economic losses, disputes, and change orders. To certify these works transparently and precisely, a tamperproof digital asset tracking system is important. Blockchain can be the potential solution due to the immutability and trustworthiness of its record, while building information modeling (BIM)-based digital twins can provide rich semantic information on building assets. However, current studies have not achieved sufficient collaboration for automatic asset tracking and change visualization. To address the limitation, this paper proposes an integrated BIM-based blockchain framework based on smart contracts. First, assets and their semantic information, as well as construction schedule with the dependency among their relevant activities, are automatically transmitted from BIM to the blockchain, where corresponding QR codes are generated to attach physical assets. As their physical tracking data are updated in the blockchain, if any delay, the potential changes will be automatically propagated to all affected activities by executing compiled smart contracts. Once stakeholders certify these changes, the affected activities with corresponding assets are automatically visualized in the 4D environment for timely notification and collaboration. We also develop a prototype system to validate this framework’s feasibility in a trusted and traceable way.