A Blockchain-Enabled Urban Digital Twin: Decentralized Asset Management Using City Information Modeling
摘要
More than half of the global population now live in cities, and despite numerous technological advancements in many industries, traditional approaches still prevail in city planning and urban asset management. Recently, blockchain integration has been successfully deployed to proffer solutions to longstanding challenges in certain aspects of design, construction, and city management. This study demonstrates a Building Information Modeling (BIM) – Digital Twin (DT) – Blockchain unification at an urban scale to manage corresponding physical assets. A cross-section of Inner Road, Gainesville on University of Florida campus is digitized as a hypothetical urban study, using Internet of Things (IoT) devices to establish communication between the physical assets and their Digital Twin models. Data obtained from IoT is shared through a private blockchain network, distributed only to relevant stakeholders. This asset management approach is validated through the enumeration of application scenarios for which the framework can be deployed and later on using ethnographic survey of asset owners within the digitized area in focus. The study shows that a decentralized Digital Twin ensures a transparent real-time information management that relies not on trust between parties, but on shared, distributed responsibility for storage and retrieval of records. The significant reduction of information imbalance amongst stakeholders also eliminates third-party bureaucracy. The outcome of this study contributes to research and practice by demonstrating that peer-to-peer information management and governance improves operational efficiency.