Balfour Beatty is working with tech giant Microsoft to explore AI opportunities in construction.
Last week the UK’s biggest contractor organised a ‘Big AI Challenge’ event at Microsoft’s flagship Experience Centre in London’s West End, attended by 70 employees from both organisations.
Ideas identified include auto-generation of inspection and test plans (ITPs) and clustering highways repairs to reduce travel time.
Jon Ozanne, chief information officer at Balfour Beatty, said: “We came together to test out how we could use data and AI to generate solutions for six business-generated ideas submitted through ‘My Contribution’ – our programme for employee-led business change.”
From these ideas, Balfour Beatty has picked two which will be refined, scaled and deployed across the business.
Auto generation of inspection and test plans
“ITPs are to quality what method statements are to safety – every activity requires one (meaning we produce thousands each year), and they must be accurate to prevent costly defects and rework,” explained Ozanne.
“One of the six teams created a prototype tool which automatically populates the required information into a template, reducing human error, improving quality, and saving time.”
Highways repair ‘clustering’
“Balfour Beatty Living Places repairs c220,000 potholes each year, averaging 6.5 jobs per team per day,” Ozanne said. “Those jobs are scheduled manually, which means inefficiencies, human error and resource mismanagement can creep in.
“The other winning team worked out that by developing and teaching the AI tool to ‘cluster’ the jobs you can reduce mileage and travel time, increasing the number of jobs a team can take on and consequently, driving a 20% productivity gain, reduced carbon emissions, road space optimisation and reduced road user disruption.”
Ozanne added: “These ideas are just the start. Our next steps are to work on each of the six ideas in the coming weeks, properly mapping and planning resources, testing technology and seeing what’s required to progress from proven concepts into scalable solutions.”
