Combining blockchain and BPMN coreographies for construction management

Abstract

Blockchain is considered a key technology of the digital revolution and the contraposition of stakeholders in the AECO sector made it the hoped-for means to trust each other. Construction site management due to its complexity and the pluralism of the actors involved can be modelled as a BPMN choreography. This work aims to provide the construction domain with a framework for driving the digitalization of processes through exploitation of blockchains and smart contracts. The main contribution of this research is the application of blockchain for introducing trust in adversarial supply chain actors by notarizing the state of each intra-organizational process. BLACKGROUND Blockchain application in constructionDespite decentralization and fragmentation are typycal of AECO sector, its strongh capacity of resisting to new technologies adoption results in a slow research and introduction of blockchain that would be highly beneficial for processes efficiency (Yang et al., 2020). On the other hand, the numerosity and different interests of actors involved in a building lifecycle demand a wide

Blockchain based choreographies: The construction industry case study

“…For this reason, some preliminary tests have been made and reported in literature. 23,24,26,27,29,30 They all focus on accountability but not on the enforcement and the transparency of choreographies. More specifically, the issues addressed by these first attempts regard some well-known criticalities of the contruction industry such as administration time and document management in general.…”

“…On the other hand, its decentralized and fragmented characteristics match well with the decentralized properties of blockchains. For this reason, some preliminary tests have been made and reported in literature 23,24,26,27,29,30 . They all focus on accountability but not on the enforcement and the transparency of choreographies.…”

“…20,22 In addition, the construction industry cannot adopt centralized solutions when enforcing the overall construction process: indeed, a construction work involves several actors that work in parallel, at different speeds, and synchronize only on a limited amount of "steps" of the overall process (e.g., in order to agree on the safety measures to be adopted in the construction area, or to collect samples of the concrete poured in the foundation pillars). It should not be surprising that, being the construction processes so distributed asynchronously among the participants, both the academia [23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30] and the world of industry ¶31 are demanding frameworks that ensure the aforementioned transparency, accountability, and runtime compliance requirements. This work is structured as follows.…”