*ORIS* An artificial intelligence-based digital platform helps shrink the carbon footprint of road construction while building more resilient and cost-effective roadways.
IBM worked with ORIS to build the platform as a series of containerized applications using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), so it can be scaled globally and efficiently. This enabled ORIS to support road projects in Azerbaijan, France, Mexico, and the United Kingdom. And it will expand to support rail, waterways, and more.
ORIS helps reduce overall road project costs by up to 30 percent, decreased overall carbon emissions by up to 50 percent, and lowered the use of natural resources by up to 80 percent by tripling road lifespan.
What connects people to their food supply, healthcare, and livelihoods every day? Roads. They give people access to essential services and each other. They also increase economic opportunities for emerging communities. But there's no way around it: Roads have an enormous environmental impact.
Paving a half-mile (1 km) of a four-lane highway requires an estimated 40,000 tons of materials and produces at least 1,300 tons of CO2-that's before cars touch the pavement. Imagine the impact you could make if you could shrink the carbon footprint of every new road.
Such is the vision of ORIS (which stands for Sourcing Intelligence for Road Optimization in reverse). The company worked with AWS Premier Tier Services Partner IBM to create an artificial intelligence-based based digital platform, also called ORIS.
It shows transportation planners, engineers, suppliers, and contractors how more sustainable materials and processes not only fit into their projects but make roads more resilient and sustainable-without driving costs and materials consumption out of control.
Leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) data services, IBM enabled ORIS to automatically acquire and connect all the necessary data for each unique project on a single platform and provide insights and recommendations to various stakeholders. For example, ORIS can calculate the total CO2 emissions of a road construction project, predict future maintenance costs, and even recommend locally available (and sometimes recycled) materials from a database of more than 30,000 suppliers.
ORIS can show and compare multiple recommendations based on different project goals, such as reducing carbon footprint or minimizing future maintenance costs.
By demonstrating that more sustainable choices are not only available-but optimal in some cases-ORIS is helping move people and environmental goals forward together.
