A Mixed Review of Cash Flow Modeling: Potential of Blockchain for Modular Construction

Abstract

Cash is considered the most critical resource in construction projects. However, many contractors fail to obtain adequate liquidity due to a lack of proper cash flow management. Therefore, numerous research studies have been conducted to address cash flow-related issues in the construction industry. However, the literature still lacks a comprehensive review of cash flow management, methods and topics, in the construction industry. This study contributes by providing a holistic, up-to-date, and thorough review of 172 journal articles on construction cash flow. To achieve this primary objective, the study applies a mixed review methodology using scientometric and systematic reviews. The scientometric analysis provides the most contributing scholars, the timeline of cash flow research attention, and keywords clustering. On the other hand, the systematic analysis categorizes the cash flow themes, identifies current literature gaps, and highlights future research areas in the cash flow domain. The results show that cash flow analysis gained more research attention in the last two decades, cash flow-based schedule is the most frequent topic in the literature, and optimization techniques are predominant in the literature. Consequently, the study highlights five potential research frontiers. Further, an automated payment framework for modular construction projects using Blockchain-based smart contracts is developed to address some of the literature limitations. This study provides a guideline for future research efforts and raises researchers’ awareness of the latest trends and methods of construction cash flow analysis.

Blockchain in Finance: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Of the studies included in SLR, 21 are articles, 9 are proceeding papers, 4 are review articles and 1 is a book chapter. The study by Angela Walch [48] is published as both an article and a book chapter.…”

“…While existing blockchain infrastructures are generally used, specialized blockchain infrastructures such as Dizar [21] are also used. Among the infrastructures for the use of blockchain in finance, Ethereum is seen in 14 studies [20,23,26,28,34,35,38,[40][41][42]45,[47][48][49], Corda R3 in 6 [18,26,30,32,37,48], Hyperledger Fabric in 5 [18,24,29,36,37,48], Ripple in 4 [26,30,44,47], Eos in 3 [20,23,42], Hyperledger Sawtooth in 2 [24,29], Stellar in 2 [20,30] and different blockchain infrastructures in others.…”

“…That's why, blockchain is often mentioned together with distributed ledger technology. As seen in Figure 7, the "Distributed Ledger" is expressed 20 times [22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31]33,37,40,41,43,44,[46][47][48]51], the "Financial" 3 times [44,46,47], the "Building information modeling" 2 times [39,50], the "Government" 2 times [41,43], the "Internet" 2 times [29,45] and other technologies is seen one time each. Figure 8 shows the relationship between blockchain infrastructures and the technologies used with blockchain.…”

“…As seen in Figure 9, the "Transparency" expression is included in 11 papers [22][23][24][25]27,37,[46][47][48][49]51], the "Low cost" expression in 11 papers [26,28,30,32,42,[45][46][47][49][50][51], the "Security" expression in 8 papers [24,25,32,34,36,38,47,49], the "Without intermediaries" in 8 papers [18,20,22,23,26,40,42,48], the "Immutability" in 5 papers [18,24,37,40,48], the "Resilience" in 4 papers [22,24,41,48], the "Decentralization" in 4 papers [23,…”

“…As seen in Figure 12, among the permission types for the use of blockchain in finance, the "Permissioned" is seen in 18 studies [18][19][20][21][22][24][25][26]28,31,32,36,38,40,41,45,47,48], and the "Permissionless" in 13 studies [20,23,24,26,30,34,36,40,42,[45][46][47][48] in the papers. Some blockchain infrastructures provide either permissioned or permissionless functions, while others provide both.…”