L Liu, Yuming Liu, Xizhen Xu
The digital transformation of building permitting is profoundly reshaping regulatory governance in the architecture, engineering and construction sector, aiming to improve transparency, efficiency and multi-stakeholder collaboration. However, current digital permitting systems often struggle to manage the dynamic complexity arising from multi-source information flows, regulatory inconsistencies and feedback delays, especially in cross-platform coordination contexts. To address these challenges, this research constructs a system dynamics model grounded in organizational information processing theory to investigate how five critical drivers-permitting information load, regulation inconsistency perception, interface mapping efficiency, multi-source input density and feedback lag accumulation-jointly affect the evolution of full life-cycle collaborative performance and cross-platform collaboration complexity. Through simulation experiments under multiple time-delay scenarios, the model reveals a nonlinear inverse coupling relationship between performance and complexity, where sudden time delays exacerbate regulatory perception risks and reduce coordination adaptability. Notably, the result demonstrates that while both collaborative performance and complexity are sensitive to delays, the performance trajectory exhibits greater temporal resilience due to structural compensation mechanisms embedded within the system. These findings offer new theoretical insights into dynamic coordination resilience and provide practical implications for the design and governance of adaptive digital permitting frameworks in complex regulatory environments.