Blockchain 3.0 Poised to Revolutionize BIM Data Exchange,New Research Shows
New York,NY – The construction industry is on the cusp of a major efficiency upgrade thanks to groundbreaking research into blockchain technology and Building Data Modeling (BIM). A team led by Lingming KONG, Rui ZHAO, Chimay J. ANUMBA, Weisheng LU, and Fan XUE has developed a new system that dramatically improves how BIM data is shared and managed between teams, addressing long-standing issues of redundancy, traceability, and security.
For years, the construction industry has embraced BIM for its potential to streamline project workflows. However, conventional file-based data exchange has proven clunky and inefficient. sending large BIM files back and forth, even when only minor changes have been made, leads to wasted time and resources. Existing standards like the Industrial Foundation Classes (IFC) haven’t fully solved these problems.
While cloud computing and blockchain have been explored as potential solutions, they’ve faced hurdles. Blockchain, in particular, struggles with the sheer size of typical BIM files. Existing solutions also lack the granular detail needed to track changes at a semantic level – meaning what specifically was changed, not just that something was changed.
This new research, published in Front. Eng. Manag., introduces a “traceable semantic differential transaction” (tSDT) approach.This innovative method minimizes data redundancy and allows for precise tracking of BIM changes. The team has also developed openBIMdisk, a blockchain 3.0 virtual disk that implements tSDT, enabling secure and efficient BIM exchange across multiple blockchain services.
Key Findings:
* minimal Redundancy: the tSDT approach demonstrated exceptional efficiency, requiring only 0.007% of disk space to store and restore all BIM changes during testing.
* Rapid Traceability: openBIMdisk facilitated fast BIM version management and object-level semantic traceability, with a response time of just 5.3 milliseconds.
* Enhanced Security: Leveraging