Common Data Environments in construction: State-of-the-art and challenges for practical implementation

Preprint, 2022

The basic premise of a Common Data Environment (CDE) proposed by ISO19650 is exposing all relevant data as a single source of truth and facilitating the seamless exchange and continuous collaboration between stakeholders – yet available CDE tools meet these requirements in different ways. This work aims to investigate how the idea of CDE presented by ISO19650 is applied in the industry, which tools are currently used as a CDE, and what their practical challenges are. First, we conduct a systematic literature review followed by a survey and semi-structured interviews with industry experts. Furthermore, we provide a critical review of some of the CDE tools available on the market. The results indicate that construction information is usually stored in multiple sources simultaneously leading to data accountability, transparency and reliability issues. To tackle those challenges the use of novel technologies in CDE development such as blockchain could be further investigated.