10 June, 2020

*originaly published in Automation in Construction.

Putting elephant BIMs in the blockchain 'fridge'...

Those attempting to integrate building information modeling (BIM) and blockchain (BC) soon encounter the enormous challenge of information redundancy. Storage of duplicated building information in decentralized ledgers already creates redundancy, and this is exacerbated as the BIM model develops and is utilized.

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Novel Semantic Differential Transaction (SDT) approach

Xue and Lu (2020) presents a novel SDT approach to minimizing information redundancy in the nascent field of BIM and BC integration. Whereas the conventional thinking is to store an entire BIM model in BC, SDT captures distributed BIM changes into a BIM change contract (BCC).

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Experimental tests

The results show that SDT captures, in near real time, sequential and simultaneous BIM changes at <0.02% of the Industry Foundation Classes file size. We also prove model restoration from the lightweight BCCs in a small-scale BIM project. This research can help the industry advance beyond the rhetoric to develop operable blockchain BIM systems.

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