ALICE Technologies and Align JV have announced plans to expand their partnership on HS2, one of the largest infrastructure construction projects in Europe. General contractors everywhere use artificial intelligence (AI) to plan, bid, and execute large-scale infrastructure and commercial projects more efficiently with ALICE Technologies’ construction simulation and optimization platform.
ALICE Founder and CEO René Morkos, said, “Our platform is ideal for large-scale infrastructure projects like HS2. With this work, we have an opportunity to contribute to the success of a major strategic transportation project in the U.K., and we’re excited to be extending the scope of our partnership with Align to help solve some of the complex construction challenges associated with a project of this magnitude.”
Traditional planning involves a team of planners building the program, assigning durations, and determining cost and constraints. Next, the program is reviewed by members of the commercial and operational teams. This process is time-consuming and resource-intensive. The ALICE platform allows Align to generate thousands of potential sequence options for planning teams to evaluate, along with fully loaded construction schedules.
Daniel Altier, project director at Align JV, said, “I would like to thank both the ALICE team and the Align project team for their hard work on progressing this innovative technology. I believe ALICE is the future for large infrastructure projects, hence why we continue to strengthen our relationship with René and his team.”
Align identified several ways to introduce flexibility into their original production schedule using ALICE. The team determined, for example, that adding a second team of concrete pile cap installers would be particularly useful midway through the project. In addition, an increase in Saturday overtime was found to be useful, but “more” was not always “better.”
ALICE also enabled Align to make better decisions about its scheduling choices much faster. All of this was accomplished remotely during the COVID-19 crisis, making it even more impressive.
