CPAS: A Copyright-Protected Autonomous Sharing Scheme by Blockchain and Smart Contract for BIM Data

Abstract

Building Information Model (BIM) has been envisioned as one of the most promising technology for smart construction industry, e.g., industry 4.0 or industry digitalization. BIM data is of the most importance in the smart construction since the data can cover the whole life cycle of the building, which is somewhat also called digital twins. BIM data usually stored in cloud servers and finally BIM big data is formed. The BIM data is always required to be shared among a large number of contributors, and re-use of those data will greatly decrease the development delay. As BIM data usually encloses the intellectual property of contributors, the sharing of BIM data may be unwilling and thus difficult, especially in open data sharing over specific platforms or markets. To promote the re-use and replication of BIM data yet protect the intellectual property, we propose a blockchain and smart contract based scheme in this paper. The blockchain technology can encourage the sharing by awarding of tokens and trace the sharing behaviors. Smart contract can implement autonomous sharing with copyright registration, authentication, and verification. The experiment results justified that our proposed scheme is practical.