the current status of blockchain technology in the contractmanagement 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.