Blockchain-enabled cyber-physical system for construction site management: A pilot implementation

Abstract

Prefabricated construction has become one of the most innovative methods to address the pressing housing demands. However, conventional prefabricated construction projects often suffer from challenges of managing numerous paper-based documentation, non-standardized management and intricate stakeholders in construction site management (CSM). The current design approaches lack sufficient consideration of the activity-based user relationships. To facilitate the system framework design and implementation for CSM, this study proposes a generic Cyber-physical Centered (CCD) Design, illustrating an effective and systematic approach to identify user-activity relationships in a cross-collaborative context. The consideration of entity, value chain and user-activity relationships facilitate identity management and value chain management services. The proposed approach was then utilized to a pilot project to design and implement the Blockchain-enabled Cyber-physical Site Management System (BCSMS) integrated with Digital Work Supervision System (DWSS), incorporating considerations on multi-source information flow and user-centric applications design. The implemented BCSMS decentralized two types of fundamental documents in CSM - Request for Inspection and Survey Checking (RISC) form and site diary. It addresses information fragmentation and asymmetry in a cross-collaborative environment caused by manual-input and error-prone records. The proposed system was evaluated by two important system performance indicators in terms of average response time and transaction per second. The system performance test shows that the accountability of BCSMS is significant compared to DWSS, given the p-value 0.01. Blockchain effectively improves DWSS with enhanced data submission, identity management and data-driven site performance evaluation functions. This study also qualitatively analyzed the pros and cons of proposed blockchain-enabled cyber-physical system (CPS) from society-economy-technology aspects for technical practitioners, construction stakeholders and governments.