Blockchain-Enabled IoT-BIM Platform for Supply Chain Management in Modular Construction

TLDR

Modular construction requires a trustworthy IoT‑enabled BIM platform that guarantees transparency, traceability, and immutability, yet most existing IBPs are centralized and lack a single point of truth and resilience. This study introduces a permissioned blockchain‑based IoT‑BIM platform and proposes a service‑oriented architecture to enable DIK‑driven supply‑chain management in modular construction. The architecture comprises IaaS for accurate data ingestion, BaaS for interoperable BIM information, and SaaS with decentralized applications and fault‑tolerant consensus, evaluated in a modular student‑residence case study for storage cost, throughput, latency, privacy, and stakeholder feedback. Results show the BIBP delivers acceptable throughput and latency, reduces storage costs, establishes a single point of truth for BIM, eliminates single‑point failure in IoT networks, and preserves privacy and security.

Abstract

Configuring a trustworthy Internet of Things (IoT)–enabled building information modeling (BIM) platform (IBP) is significant for modular construction to ensure transparency, traceability, and immutability throughout its fragmented supply chain management. However, most current IBPs are designed adopting a centralized system architecture, which fails to achieve a decentralized and effective one to ensure a single point of truth in BIM and prevent a single point of failure in IoT networks. To address this challenge, this study introduces permissioned blockchain with IBP and proposes a novel service-oriented system architecture of blockchain-enabled IoT-BIM platform (BIBP) for the data-information-knowledge (DIK)–driven supply chain management in modular construction. First, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is designed with hardware, core technologies, and protocols to offer accurate data from daily practice to blockchain BIM. Blockchain BIM as a service (BaaS) is then developed within the permissioned blockchain to ease the interoperability of the information, semantics, and meaningful inferences. Furthermore, software as a service (SaaS) is configured with decentralized applications to achieve knowledgeable operations or processes with a crash fault-tolerant consensus mechanism. The demonstrative case study in a modular student residence project evaluates the proposed BIBP system prototype with the performance analysis of storage cost, throughput, latency, privacy, and feedback from stakeholders. The results indicate that BIBP has an effective system architecture with acceptable throughput and latency, can save storage costs to achieve a single point of truth in BIM, and avoid a single point of failure for IoT networks with privacy and security-preserving mechanisms.