Yang, J; Zhong, B; Gao, H and Wang, Y (2023) Task decomposition and service composition on an innovative blockchain-based construction service trading platform to select construction services. Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 149(12): 04023130, ISSN 0733-9364
Abstract
To address the construction industry's fragmented resources and to facilitate its service-oriented transformation, a new service paradigm of a construction service trading platform (CSTP) enables the sharing and trading of distributed construction services. However, the current platform with centralized management cannot provide an online trading environment with information security and transaction transparency without the involvement of a trusted third party. Existing approaches to selecting services for complex tasks also ignore security and transparency, even though these are critical to the platform. This study selected services for complex tasks securely and transparently, and made three contributions. First, an innovative blockchain-based construction service trading platform (B-CSTP) is proposed, which can provide a secure and transparent trading environment. Second, smart contract-based task decomposition and service composition (TDSC) was established, in which three main functions were designed to implement the service selection approach for the complex task. Third, an Ethereum-based system was established to demonstrate the proposed B-CSTP and smart contracts for TDSC. A survey of construction professionals was established to evaluate the framework of the proposed B-CSTP, and experiments were conducted to evaluate the designed functions of the smart contract for TDSC. The results show that the proposed B-CSTP and the designed function of smart contracts are feasible. The survey reveals that 80% and 70% of survey participants had positive attitudes toward its security and transparency, respectively. Furthermore, the experiment results show that the design functions of smart contracts were effective and reasonable in selecting services. This study contributes to the new service paradigm and the problem of selecting services by combining blockchain and smart contract technology. This study expands the application scenarios for blockchain in CSTP and makes significant advances in using smart contracts for TDSC.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | consortium blockchain; construction service trading platform; select multiple construction services; smart contract; task decomposition and service composition |
| Index terms: | service trading, transformation, consortium, platform, smart contract, construction industry, transparency, blockchain, paradigm, construction professional, survey, experiment |
| Subjects: | industry analysis, partnership management, digital design, professional development, education and knowledge transfer, digital technology, computing systems, data collection methods, organization, business |
| Topics: | Digital Applications, Business Strategy, Research Practice, Information Management, Stakeholder Management |
| Descriptive scope: | 4 PCTE |
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