Blockchain-Enabled Distributed Digital Twin Approach with Ontological Schema for Construction ESG Data Integration

In response to the global imperative to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the construction sector urgently requires verifiable and auditable Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) information delivery. This is fundamentally challenged by the difficulty in multi-source heterogeneous data integration and the difficulty in asynchronous and trusted data processing across the project lifecycle. To address these dual challenges, this study proposes a blockchain-enabled distributed digital twin approach with an ontological schema for construction ESG delivery. The objectives of this study are threefold: (1) to develop a blockchain-enabled distributed construction digital twin (DCDT) framework to enable the delivery of ESG activity data within the complex construction lifecycle; (2) to propose an ontology-based metadata schema for the integration of multi-source heterogeneous ESG data in the construction industry within the DCDT framework; and (3) to establish an epoch-gated periodic smart contract mechanism to support the construction of ESG data knowledge graphs and traceable data delivery during the construction process. The integrated approach enables a trustworthy data ecosystem where semantically unified ESG information from BIM, IoT, and other sources is immutably recorded on a distributed ledger, while verification rules related to time and stage are automatically executed via smart contracts. In design verification scenarios, the DCDT framework demonstrated usability. The ontology-based metadata scheme effectively addressed all data requirements of all competency questions, with an average ESG knowledge graph generation time of approximately 2.26 min for large datasets. Furthermore, the smart contract latency was 0.75 milliseconds and a TPS of 81.3, outperforming existing methods. This work contributes a comprehensive technical framework that bridges critical research gaps in semantic interoperability and trustworthy data governance for digital twins in construction.