While Alice Technologies may have benefitted from the Great Construction AI Hype Cycle of 2023, there is real power under the hood of this product that can help compress construction timelines and shave cost. Here, Founder and CEO Rene Morkos lets us take him over the IRONPROS hurdles so we can learn more.
MORKOS: So Alice is the world's first generative construction simulator. And what that means it's a software that can take a construction project, and then build it 6 million different ways for you. It builds it with one crane, two cranes time over time. Basically, Alice does for construction what BIM did for design. It allows you to change a parameter--in the design world, you can change the height of the columns, and everything updates with it. You can change the number of cranes over time,
IRONPROS: It sounds pretty, pretty simple. But, you know, I do a lot of fishing in areas where you don't see other people. And that's because if it's easy to fish there, everyone would be doing it. So what are some things about this that did make it more challenging? Because there are constraint-based scheduling tools for other industries. So why is this so hard?
MORKOS: It's definitely hard. I spent 13 years and 41,000 hours of my life on it. Scheduling is what we at the department at Stanford are referred to as a high jump, not a long jump problem. And so think of a long jump, you jump in however many hours, whatever distance you jump, that's how many points you get. With the high jump problem, you either make it or you don't. And so scheduling is a high jump problem. And here's why. Let's assume that I develop a scheduler, and it's great, I give it to you, and ... STREAM OUR FULL CONVERSATION FOR MORE ...
