Equipment World Digital Magazine
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/933470
EquipmentWorld.com | January 2018 37 I magine you're the chief of op- erations for a big construction company. You have three proj- ects underway, dozens of machines and workers to keep up with. Just before you leave the house in the morning, you open your laptop to check on the status of those proj- ects on your telematics reporting system. Project A and B are good. Green lights on both. But when you click on project C, you get a flashing red light, indicating the potential for safety issues. Drill down further and you discover: • A supplier dropped the rebar off last night, weeks early, right in the middle of the dirt work. • The site supervisor who's been on this project since day one called in sick. Another supervisor who's never seen the job is on his way to fill in, but arriving late. • Of the operators manning four machines and three trucks on the site, only two of them have more than a year's experience. • Predicted weather conditions may limit visibility. It may sound like just another chaotic day in the world of con- struction, but your telematics system is equipped with AI, artifi- cial intelligence, sometimes called "machine learning." As all this in- formation enters the system, the AI algorithms compute the probability of an accident in these conditions at 60 percent. Not good. So you email the new supervi- sor to hold fire, ping the shop to get a set of forks out there to move the rebar and head for the project instead of the office to assess the situation. There you talk to the crews and conduct a site-specific safety briefing. Your telematics AI algorithms register these changes and drop the threat threshold below the company redlines. The threat potential of an accident – something no individual human could have possibly predict- maintenance/management | by Tom Jackson | TJackson@randallreilly.com Machine learning, gamification and better dashboards will spur the biggest changes construction has seen in decades THE FUTURE IS COMING AT YOU FAST: