BUILDCHAIN, a strongly interdisciplinary research project coordinated by the University of Pisa and involving 11 European partners, was begun with the aim of developing a digital platform capable of tracking the activities related to the life cycle of buildings. Financed by the European Commission as part of the Horizon Europe programme for a total of 5,182,600 million euros - of which approximately 681,650 euros are earmarked for the University of Pisa – the project has Pietro Croce, Associate Professor of Construction Technology at the Department of Civil and Industrial Engineering, as its chief scientific officer.
"The idea of BUILDCHAIN is to build advanced digital knowledge aimed at tracking all activities related to the life cycle of a building" explains Professor Croce, "Starting from the European Union directives on sustainability, resilience and energy efficiency of the building stock, it is intended to provide a digital platform (LogBook) where several participants with different skills in the construction and management of large sets of buildings can share their knowledge, including quality certificates and credentials, so that all information, activities and changes can be recorded and tracked, in order to improve sustainability too'.
The project will extend the tools and functionalities already available in an existing Digital Building LogBook (DBL), used by the Municipality of Florence for the management and administration of a large set of buildings (about two thousand five hundred), with innovative functionalities, tools, and data. Moreover, with the help of a decentralised knowledge graph (DKG), it will offer an open source blockchain-based solution.
The DKG software will include specific ontologies related to buildings, so that all the knowledge and information on the life cycle of a building can be recorded, archived, and continuously updated, providing tools and interfaces for different stakeholders (engineers, builders, managers, maintainers, etc.) in order to publish, track, share, modify, update and retrieve data and even introduce business models in the market economy. The integration of information and its processing will be able to help determine which policies are the most appropriate in the management of the building stock, also for the optimal allocation of available resources in the context of intervention planning strategies for large groups of buildings.
Professor Pietro Croce.
The innovative DBL, characterised by a multiscale and multilevel implementation, will be integrated with several new functionalities, including structural monitoring, seismic vulnerability, climate change adaptation, also for the operational management of extreme weather events on an urban scale, and building life cycle assessment. Particular attention will be paid to the interoperability between legacy systems and existing tools, such as for instance general BIM (Building Information Modelling) and H-BIM (Heritage BIM) models, specifically used in the field of cultural heritage conservation, also to define an automated warning and alert system, based on Artificial Intelligence, machine learning and “digital twins”. New DBL-based applications will be tested on pilot projects focusing on historic and strategic buildings and on groups of buildings. The aim of the project is to achieve, in accordance with EU policies, a more intelligent and sustainable built environment, opening innovative markets and fostering new valuable creations.
BUILDCHAIN (BUILDing knowledge book in the blockCHAIN distributed ledger. Trustworthy building life cycle knowledge graph for sustainability and energy efficiency) has a duration of three years and as other partners has SZTAKI (Institute for Computer Science and Control) - Budapest (HU); University of Granada (ES); ZAG (Slovenia National Building and Civil Engineering Institute) - Ljubljana (SI); University of Ljubljana (SI); Athens University of Economics and Business Research Center - Athens (GR); Origin Trail (Prospeh) - Ljubljana (SI); RINA Consulting - Genoa (IT); CLIO srl - Lecce (IT); Municipality of Florence (IT); BEXEL Consulting - Belgrade (RS); PRP - Ljubljana (SI).