A Hybrid Blockchain-BIM Platform for Construction Project Design-Phase Quality Assurance

Abstract

For the construction projects design-phase Building Information Modelling (BIM) workflows are still coordinated through siloed approvals and weakly enforced quality checks. The ultimate aim of this study is to propose a hybrid blockchain-backed BIM platform that provides representational conversion for submission, validation, approval and revision as smart-contract-controlled state transitions on a permissioned ledger, recurrently settled on the public blockchain for finality. For this purpose, a simulation-based comparison is done for the platform with a centralized workflow across three load levels. Simulation results revealed that, the hybrid configuration achieved lower and more stable latency (median 1.5-2.8 s versus a markedly wider, load-sensitive baseline distribution), higher throughput, higher transaction integrity, more complete audit traces and closer alignment between validation results/outputs and approval decisions, with the largest gap observed for final approval (φ = 0.32). These results show that ledger-based state transitions can improve efficiency, quality-gate enforcement and record reliability and authenticity in the design phase of the construction projects.