With the widespread application of Building Information Modeling (BIM) in construction engineering management, traditional file-based BIM exchange among multidisciplinary teams faces prominent challenges. These include low efficiency caused by redundant data transmission from mostly unchanged BIM objects and limited traceability of changes between BIM files. Although the Industrial Foundation Classes (IFC) standard has been developed to support seamless BIM data exchange, it still encounters issues of redundancy, traceability, and security. While cloud computing and blockchain technologies have been explored to address these challenges, they have limitations such as blockchain’s inability to directly store large IFC files and the lack of semantic-level traceability in existing solutions.
Therefore, Lingming KONG, Rui ZHAO, Chimay J. ANUMBA, Weisheng LU, and Fan XUE have conducted a research entitled “Open BIM exchange on Blockchain 3.0 virtual disk: A traceable semantic differential transaction approach”.
This study proposes a traceable semantic differential transaction (tSDT) approach for open BIM exchange, which minimizes data redundancy and enables semantic-level traceability of BIM changes. Additionally, the research develops openBIMdisk, which implements the tSDT approach and provides a Blockchain 3.0 virtual disk to support efficient, traceable, and secure BIM exchanges across multiple blockchain services. A pilot study on a modular construction project verified the effectiveness of tSDT and openBIMdisk. Experimental results showed that tSDT achieved minimal BIM redundancy when storing and restoring all BIM changes, using an average of only 0.007% of disk space. openBIMdisk facilitated BIM version management and object-level semantic traceability with a response time of 5.3 ms. The contributions of this research are twofold: first, tSDT offers a novel and efficient method for semantic BIM change traceability; second, openBIMdisk provides BIM practitioners with a Blockchain 3.0 application featuring intuitive and user-friendly interfaces for BIM exchange.
The paper “Open BIM exchange on Blockchain 3.0 virtual disk: A traceable semantic differential transaction approach” is authored by Lingming KONG, Rui ZHAO, Chimay J. ANUMBA, Weisheng LU, Fan XUE. It is published in Front. Eng. Manag. 2025, 12(3): 510–528, with the open access full text available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s42524-024-4006-x.
