Blockchain Integrated Decentralized Cloud Storage and Immutable Smart Contract Platform for Secure and Trustworthy Collaborative BIM

Abstract Collaborative building information modeling (BIM) relies on centralized platforms, which provide limited solutions for achieving trust, security, privacy, accessibility, and sustainability. Few research studies have adopted blockchain technology for collaborative BIM; however, they have achieved limited success in resolving current issues, as their main focus was on recordkeeping or the distribution of BIM data. This paper aims to fill this gap by presenting a novel blockchain approach that integrates decentralized cloud storage and immutable smart contract technologies to address the current limitations of existing solutions and achieve a secure, trustworthy BIM collaboration platform. The new platform enforces data governance through immutable smart contracts and securely stores BIM documents in a decentralized cloud storage system, without requiring a server or any party’s data governance. Hence, the proposed unique BIM collaboration platform solution addresses the majority of the privacy, governance, and security concerns associated with the existing centralized BIM platforms. A real-world project is utilized to assess the advantages and limitations of the new BIM collaboration solution. The findings reveal that the proposed decentralized platform contributes to the state of the art and practice by achieving trustworthy governance, decentralized data storage and access, sustainability, and extra layers of security for collaborative BIM. The new blockchain-integrated decentralized cloud storage and immutable smart contract platform offers major advantages over traditional BIM collaboration platforms, including trustworthy governance, decentralization, resistance to cyberattacks, improved accessibility, secure authentication, and enhanced sustainability at a lower cost.