The Current status of Blockchain technology in the contract management process of Iran s AEC projects

The AEC industry is a complex industry that is currently facing many challenges. Contract management is one of the main topics that, if ignored, might cause a massive catastrophe. Digital technologies are considered a way to improve the contract management process. Blockchain is one of those technologies. This paper hopes to investigate the status of blockchain in the AEC industry by doing a bibliometric analysis based on year keyword and Journal and then a literature review on the related papers. After that, a semi-constructed interview was carried out with four experts (two of them industry practitioners and the other two academicians) to investigate the country-specific situation of Iran s AEC industry. The result has shown that blockchain s capability in the contract management process can be divided into four sections: pre-construction activities, smart contracts, dispute mitigation, claim management, and information management. It was shown that as Iran s AEC industry is traditional and is currently dealing with fundamental problems, blockchain and smart contract adoption are far ahead.