SBIR Phase I: Distributed Ledger Technology Based Collaborative Project Management Platform

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to improve the performance and accountability of capital projects which have significant economic and social impact. Large capital projects, such as infrastructure and energy, have long-term benefits to economies, affect local communities, and have geopolitical implications. Projects in important sectors such as defense, science, and healthcare often suffer massive cost and time overruns, making efficient and verifiable project execution highly beneficial. These projects are very complex and challenging to manage; they require multiple internal stakeholders to work together and affect many external communities. The proposed solution is a platform that enables self-regulating project networks and integrates schedules, contracts, and information flow across companies. This platform will be based on distributed ledger technology and smart contracts, making them transparent, efficient, and secure. The proposed solution will create a new, reliable, measurable paradigm for capital projects and allow multiple companies to collaboratively plan and collectively build them. It will also aid regulatory oversight, and projects will include all stakeholders. The platform will be revolutionary for complex projects planning and building, significantly improving cost and schedule performance, and bringing greater accountability to the multi-trillion dollar capital project market.This SBIR Phase I project proposes to develop a platform using blockchain technology that improves the performance and accountability of capital projects. The technology will enable significantly improved transparency, while making projects more cost and schedule efficient. The platform will result in more responsive and responsible symbiotic project ecosystems and advance the application of directed, acyclic, graph based distributed ledger technology to multi-party enterprise workflows. The collaborative governance platform will enable self-regulating project networks of authenticated stakeholders, utilizing a consensus-based single-source-of-truth, and automate contract execution and value exchange. The platform will synchronize schedules, contracts, and payments into one system with verifiable consensus across all participants. The technology will incentivize project performance by mitigating the effects of complexity and enable artificial intelligence and machine learning applications for projects by providing verifiable data. The focus will be on developing the architecture and business model of the platform. The team will conduct market research to identify the primary commercial consumers and potential revenue streams. The project will build a proof-of-concept to demonstrate the feasibility of the platform. The anticipated results include a functional prototype of the platform and a validated business model.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.