Fluor Corporation is to adopt IBM Watson’s artificial intelligence-based systems to predict, monitor and measure the status of engineering, procurement, fabrication and construction (EPC) megaprojects from inception to completion.
Large capital projects, especially in the energy and chemicals, and mining and metals markets, are incredibly complex with enormous amounts of data, people and moving parts that are constantly changing and need to be understood to keep a project on schedule and budget.
To gain insights from project data in nearly real-time and to understand the implications of changing factors, Fluor is introducing the EPC Project Health Diagnostics (EPHDsm) and the Market Dynamics/Spend Analytics (MD/SAsm) systems. These innovative tools help to identify dependencies and provide actionable insights by fusing thousands of data points across the entire life cycle of capital projects.
Fluor can now leverage a wealth of experience from across its entire historical data store and global workforce to quickly understand markets and monitor project factors impacting cost and schedule to drive improved certainty and cost efficiency across the entire project scope.
These tools assess the status of a project by:
- Predicting issues such as rising costs or schedule delays based on historical trends and patterns
- Gaining earlier insights from many sets of complex factors across project execution
- Identifying the root causes of issues and the potential impacts of changes as input to the decision-making process including estimate analysis, forecast evaluation, project risk assessment and critical path analysis
The EPHD and MD/SA systems are designed to transform complex data into actionable business insights using domain-driven semantic models to guide artificial intelligence-based predictive and diagnostics modelling. A unique feature of the systems is the blending of data with domain expertise to learn models that are operationally insightful.
Leslie Lindgren, Fluor’s Vice President of Information Management, 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.”
As Fluor continues on its global data-centric transformation journey, the company plans to further develop and expand EPHD and MD/SA using analytics and artificial intelligence capabilities from IBM Watson and integrate them into Fluor’s processes.
For more information visit: www.fluor.com and www.ibm.com
21st September 2018
