Automating BIM Change Certification with Blockchain: A Case Study in Residential Building Design

This paper proposes and evaluates an automated BIM-Blockchain workflow to certify BIM design changes as verifiable digital evidence, aligned with ISO 19650-oriented traceability indicators.First, baseline traceability was assessed through a two-layer checklist (technical and operational) applied to a real residential BIM project developed in Revit®.Then, an end-to-end certification pipeline was implemented, where each relevant modification is exported as validated BIMXML, hashed for integrity, embedded into a BIMRegister-based smart-contract record (LegalLab), digitally signed with a timestamp (NeuroAccess), and immutably registered on a permissioned ledger (NeuroLedger) with tokenized event logs and QR-based third-party verification.Results show that, in a validation limited to one residential BIM model and three representative design changes, the prototype consistently produced complete evidence packages, increasing operational compliance from 20% to 80% and raising the global traceability index from 50% to 80%.Thus, the lighton-chain approach enhances accountability and auditability without storing full BIM models on-chain or disrupting routine BIM/CDE activities.