Digital Building Twins and Blockchain for Performance-Based (Smart) Contracts
This addresses performance evaluation and accountability issues for stakeholders in the built environment, such as building owners and service providers, by enabling automated, transparent contracts, though it is incremental as it builds on existing digital twin and blockchain technologies.
The paper tackles the practical implementation challenges of performance contracts in servitized business models by proposing a connection between digital building twins and blockchain-based smart contracts to enable real-time performance evaluation and automated payments. It demonstrates feasibility through a prototype integrating Ethereum blockchain with Siemens building twin platform, resulting in the first full-stack implementation in the built environment.
Performance contracts used for servitized business models enable consideration of overall life-cycle costs rather than just production costs. However, practical implementation of performance contracts has been limited due to challenges with performance evaluation, accountability, and financial concepts. As a solution, this paper proposes the connection of the digital building twin with blockchain-based smart contracts to execute performance-based digital payments. First, we conceptualize a technical architecture to connect blockchain to digital building twins. The digital building twin stores and evaluates performance data in real-time while the blockchain ensures transparency and trusted execution of automatic performance evaluation and rewards through smart contracts. Next, we demonstrate the feasibility of both the concept and technical architecture by integrating the Ethereum blockchain with digital building models and sensors via the Siemens building twin platform. The resulting prototype is the first full-stack implementation of a performance-based smart contract in the built environment.