The UK Government's review of Building Regulations and Fire Safety 2018 identified a series of failings in the construction sector including ambiguous and inconsistent regulations and standards; lack of clarity of roles and responsibilities; lack of enforcement of regulations and standards; poor product testing, labelling and marketing; inconsistent competency across the sector; and failure to address building occupants' concerns around health and safety. Traceability and the development of a digital record to provide a golden thread of information were two recommendations of the report. To address these recommendations, this paper considered the extent to which the integration of Building Information Modelling (BIM), distributed ledger technology (DLT), the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart contracts in the form of a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) can support enhanced traceability and the population and management of a digital record during the building maintenance phase as part of a solution to provide a platform for the digital record. A framework is proposed to bring these technological systems together creating an ecosystem that encourages digitalisation and provides traceability, better information management and compliance with regulations and standards. Further work will involve testing the framework by simulating a range of maintenance events.
In May 2018, the UK Government published an independent review of building regulations and fire safety in response to the tragic fire at Grenfell Tower. The Hackitt Review identified the need for traceability; a 'golden thread' preserving critical information about design intent and the as-constructed building in a proposed Digital Record (DR). This study proposes a framework for a DR for traceability of all built assets, new and existing. Three structured workshops including four working groups were held with industry practitioners and academics to collaboratively establish definitions of traceability and a DR. The key requirements of the DR were identified through development of 63 use cases. Building on traceability systems research in other industries, a framework for traceability of built assets was developed and analysed with industry. The framework, containing both information chains, supply chains and unique identification of traceable items, is outlined in this paper and its key components are discussed along with identification of areas for further research.
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