ALICE Technologies (ALICE) and Andrade Gutierrez (AG) – one of the largest construction and engineering companies in Latin America – recently announced that Andrade Gutierrez has selected ALICE for use on its construction projects. This collaboration will enable AG to leverage ALICE’s technology to optimize the planning and execution of its construction projects, driving greater efficiency while reducing project risks.
Headquartered in Brazil, AG has a strong reputation for innovation in the construction industry, as demonstrated by its five-time win of the Valor Innovation Award. Some of the company’s notable construction projects in Latin America include the world’s fifth largest natural gas facility, Gas Natural Açu; the world’s third largest hydroelectric mega-dam, Belo Monte; and the rebuild of the Maracanã Stadium for the 2014 World Cup, along with three other football stadiums. The company is well known for its extensive portfolio of heavy engineering projects comprising over 1000 projects such as, the construction of dams, thermoelectric plants, highways, airports and railways, hydro plants, nuclear power plants, and mining.
ALICE’s construction schedule optimization platform enables construction firms like AG as well as owners, consultants worldwide to leverage AI to plan, bid, and build complex capital industrial, infrastructure and commercial projects more efficiently and with reduced risk.
The company has started integrating ALICE into its project planning process. With the adoption of ALICE, the company expects to significantly improve its ability to explore and optimize various construction strategies and scenarios, greatly impacting both the speed and accuracy of its planning efforts.
“The use of AI during the proposal phase of contracts allows for a broader range of scenarios due to the increased processing capacity, in a much shorter time frame compared to previous methods,” says Henrique Nunes, a leader within the company’s data analytics group at Andrade Gutierrez.
Recently, Consag, one of the companies within the Andrade Gutierrez Group, began leveraging ALICE within its bidding organization to aggressively pursue new tenders and win more work for the company.
“We can see how AI employed in the tool quickly simulates various construction execution scenarios with schedules linked to costs. After the diagnosis, it became clear that the tool’s applicability within the company could bring agility to decision-making processes and improve the quality of planning carried out in projects and proposals,” adds Nunes.
According to the company, the speed at which multiple strategies and scenarios can be simulated has been reduced from more than two weeks to minutes. This has significantly optimized the time spent by planners and schedulers and provided an opportunity to mitigate risk and to perform deeper studies of the project, leading to greater accuracy in the adopted construction sequences.
René Morkos, Ph.D., CEO and founder of ALICE Technologies added, “Previously, the AG team planned only a limited number of scenarios due to the amount of time required by traditional methods. This is what sets ALICE apart from traditional planning tools—by enabling AG to simultaneously explore multiple construction scenarios and automatically generate risk-reduced schedules within minutes. Because ALICE is parametric, this allows the AG teams to dynamically adapt its schedules as project conditions change, offering a level of agility and efficiency that is just not possible with traditional tools.”
“ALICE assists us in identifying the best sequence for executing the project, speeding up scenario generation and enabling decision-making based on cost and time variables. The tool also significantly contributes to the training and development of planners, offering deeper insight into the schedule network, as the planning process becomes focused on the project’s actual constraints. This allows the AI algorithm to propose sequencing that best fits the project’s reality,” says Maurício Schneider, engineering manager responsible for implementing the tool within the company.
According to Schneider, so far, the company has achieved—and even exceeded—some expected metrics anticipated by their clients, having already applied the technology in highway, railway, port, solar farm, and thermal power plant during the bid phase and to support ongoing construction.
“With the help of technology combined with our professionals’ expertise, we seek a qualitative and quantitative leap in planning deliverables. This is a considerable competitive advantage over our competitors, adding the value sought by Consag and our clients,” Schneider concludes.
René added, “As the Latin American construction sector gears for a surge in capital projects, Andrade Gutierrez is setting a new standard for innovation in the way construction projects are planned and executed through AI-driven solutions like ALICE. We are excited to partner with Andrade Gutierrez to execute on their vision of digitization with AI.”
Building on the success of this partnership, Andrade Gutierrez expanded their usage of ALICE by deploying it on the planning and construction of a major Thermoelectric Plant, Portocem, in Brazil.