Multinational engineering and construction firm, Fluor in collaboration with IBM has introduced a mutual initiative which will observe the progress of mega projects using Artificial Intelligence (AI) based systems. The main goal of this initiative is to trigger major project cost savings.
Fluor has partnered with IBM to forecast, observe, and compute the progress of “Engineering, Procurement, Fabrication and Construction (EPC)” mega projects from initiation to completion, using AI-based systems. The goal of the project is to integrate IBM’s AI and analytic systems into Fluor’s EPC and supply chain projects to lay down the grounds for diagnostic and big data analytics. Fluor expects that the AI system will assist in forecasting outcomes of critical projects and deliver timely, deep understandings about the health of projects.
“Besides the work Fluor was already doing on predictive maintenance and construction sequencing, five years ago we began investing in predictive analytics and artificial intelligence capabilities to further evaluate performance and determine critical project outcomes as a part of our data-centric journey,” Leslie Lindgren, Vice President of Information Management, Flour, claimed.
He further said: “We will be using these innovations on select large and megaprojects to quickly discover trends, patterns and meaning in our structured and unstructured data that deliver competitive advantage through the digital transformation of data into critical information with significant benefits to our clients, other stakeholders and our company.”
Big budget projects, particularly in the chemical and energy, and metals and mining marketplaces, are amazingly complicated due to the involvement of large amounts of data, people, frequently varying moving parts, and requirements to maintain projects according to budgets and schedules, told Fluor.
The company is announcing “EPC Project Health Diagnostics” and “Market Dynamics/Spend Analytics” systems to get almost real-time deep understandings from the data of projects and to comprehend the effects of variable factors.
AI systems have been established by collective work done by Fluor, IBM Services and IBM Research. They will be utilized to assist in recognizing dependencies and delivering illegal insights by combining the large amount of data points of capital projects’ whole life cycle.
“Harnessing the power of data to make meaningful insights will alter how megaprojects around the world are designed, built and maintained,” Arvind Krishna, Senior Director and Vice President of IBM Research, claimed. “Together with IBM, Fluor is embracing artificial intelligence as an engine for transformation in data-driven industries that are ripe for innovation including energy and chemicals, and mining and metals construction projects.”
“The ability to rapidly analyse and comprehend big data that drives decisions at any point throughout the engineering, procurement, fabrication and construction of today’s mega projects is an imperative for the success of our company and the protection of our clients’ capital investments,” Ray Barnard, Senior Executive Vice president of supply chain and system, Fluor, said.
Flour’s AI systems will measure the progress of a project by:
- Forecasting problems such as schedule delays or rising costs using the historical data;
- Getting timely deep understandings from various sets of complicated factors during project execution;
- Recognizing the origins of problems and the likely influences of variations when they are given as input to the process of decision-making.
