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.