AWS for Industries

ORIS supports sustainability with scalable business impact in Road Construction on AWS

ORIS is a digital material platform running on AWS that enables road professionals and road authorities to make data-driven decisions for more sustainable roads.

ORIS insights can help reduce the carbon emissions of road construction by up to 50%, so that more communities can benefit from new roadways at a lower environmental cost. The platform computes the parameters linked to the project in its actual context (usage, local material availability, weather conditions) and visualizes multiple pavement designs and sourcing options.

Road decision makers can then list all possible design and material options for a project and understand the trade-offs for each design for carbon footprint mitigation, increased durability, local materials circularity, and cost reduction.

This blog post highlights how ORIS and IBM Consulting are leveraging AWS Cloud services to resolve real-world sustainability challenges in the road construction industry. It also explains the solution architecture and customer benefits such as decreasing carbon footprint and reducing the usage of natural resources, resulting in building sustainable future.

ORIS is an AWS Partner that offers global consulting services, and its digital platform is directly accessible to customers in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. It will be available in several other countries soon.

Challenges

Countries invest almost 1% of the world’s GDP annually in road/rail infrastructure. However, roads are still highly CO2 and cost intensive. The road infrastructure industry consumes 25% of all building materials, while pavement design and construction massively impact projects for roughly 60% of costs and 85% of the embedded carbon emissions.

Renaud De Montaignac, the CO) at Oris, said “Quantity of aggregates would vary from 5 to 25 tons per lane, per meter for roads. 40,000 tons per kilometer for a four lanes highway is in the bottom range. For 40kT we can calculate 1,300T CO2e if using a standard flexible pavement.”

And 1,300 tons of CO2e is 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 (AI) based digital platform called ORIS. It shows transportation planners, engineers, suppliers, and contractors how more sustainable materials and processes fit into their projects and make roads more resilient and sustainable—without driving costs and materials consumption out of control.

Solution Overview

The core of ORIS is comprised of a material knowledge database enriched with specific industry knowledge like pavement structures, norms and standards, and details locally available resources called production sites. ORIS offers an easy-accessible and user-friendly entry to this data by having a feature-rich map as a first-level entry point to material and its data.

Leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) data services, ORIS can gather automatically 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 recommend locally available (and sometimes recycled) materials from a database of over 30,000 suppliers. ORIS can show and compare multiple recommendations based on project goals, such as reducing carbon footprint or minimizing future maintenance costs. By demonstrating that more sustainable choices are available and optimal in some cases, ORIS is helping move people and environmental goals forward together.

Figure 1 – ORIS map view, showing the location of material sites

While material providers usually maintain this information manually, ORIS leverages AWS Data and AI Services to build a data pipeline that automatically and continuously approaches new regions and ensures high quality data for their customers.

With an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) data lake approach as a part of this pipeline, ORIS can plug additional AI functions and AWS Services into it. This architecture allows ORIS to find new production sites using image recognition, check the quality of existing data, and enrich detailed information or even information like quality certificates, which are rarely available in traditional processes today, extracted from PDF files using Amazon Textract. ORIS uses a scalable and adaptable architecture to meet business requirements in a dynamically changing environment. This architecture consists basically of two parts:

  1. The ORIS platform offers end-user services and access to ORIS.
  2. The ORIS data pipeline eases the rollout of ORIS into new countries by semi-automatically enriching the database with high-quality data.

Figure 2 – ORIS cloud infrastructure diagram

Details from the above diagram are as follows:

  1. Amazon Route 53 is used as a global domain name system (DNS) which sets the DNS on ORIS load balancer to target the ORIS website and platform running on Kubernetes.
  2. ORIS user connects using internet-facing desktop or mobile device.
  3. Application Load Balancer routes accordingly to services running in Kubernetes.
  4. By default, the user is routed to the ORIS website which is a public, static page backed by Amazon Elastic File Service (Amazon EFS) as a mounted filesystem on the Docker application and an Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) MySQL managed database.
  5. Alternatively, the user can access the ORIS platform which also runs as a Docker application on the Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) backend. This workload is secured and requires authentication. In order to set up accounts, registration mails are sent to users using Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES).
  6. Once authenticated, the user can use the ORIS platform to manage materials, find nearby, sites, and more. All assets are stored securely in PostgreSQL and Amazon DocumentDB.

ORIS follow a highly flexible microservices approach by leveraging Amazon EKS as the primary runtime environment. The user accesses these services securely through Amazon Route 53 and Amazon Elastic Application Load Balancer, which provide secure access and geographical scaling capabilities for ORIS.

To implement a cloud-native solution, ORIS use persistency services like Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon DocumentDB, Amazon OpenSearch Service, and serverless services like Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES).

Adding serverless services like AWS Lambda and AWS Step Function in terms of data pipeline as a second workload, ORIS can quickly scale into new regions by enriching the ORIS database with high-quality data assets.

A sustainable digital solution

The ORIS team use the AWS Well-Architected Framework to continuously evaluate our entire architecture, which helps to architect a reliable, secure, cost-effective, and operatable solution that suits the market needs. Newly added, the ORIS team also monitors its impact on sustainability using the Sustainability Pillar. Thanks to the six Well-Architected pillars, ORIS as a solution for sustainable roads and infrastructure can now be validated and monitored to be a sustainable digital solution itself.

The ORIS team regularly monitor the CO2 consumption of resources on AWS using the Customer Carbon Footprint Tool. The ORIS team continuously improve the platform, applying patterns like switching from traditional Amazon EC2 x86 instances to AWS Graviton instances with less energy consumption.

Customer Benefits

ORIS digital and intelligent materials platform using AWS Cloud services connects construction ecosystems to local materials suppliers and offers easy and early due diligence toward building safer, more cost-efficient, and sustainable roads. This AI-based digital platform collects all the data centrally in the AWS Cloud. ORIS connects road authorities, transport companies, investors, engineers, and contractors with the material suppliers and provides essential insights and recommendations to various stakeholders in the road industry, resulting in:

  1. reducing the average cost by 15-30%
  2. decreasing carbon footprint by up to 50%
  3. reducing the usage of natural resources by up to 80%, and
  4. multiplying the durability of your road by up to 3 times.

Those results show transport planners that smaller carbon footprints can also be cost-effective and can help inspire broader adoption of more sustainable practices worldwide. Check our success stories for more details. ORIS was recognized for environmental sustainability in highways at the 2021 Highways Awards and the CIHT 2022 Annual Awards for International Infrastructure.

Conclusion

Building a sustainable solution is more relevant than ever. ORIS and IBM Consulting collaborated to implement this solution for the road construction and infrastructure industry. By leveraging AWS capabilities, ORIS can scale and adapt to changing needs while maintaining sustainability practices steps. ORIS is also expanding this platform on AWS to other transportation and infrastructure construction.

Click here to learn more sustainable solutions on AWS. Get in touch with ORIS to schedule a demo or learn more about ORIS material intelligence platform on AWS.

Check out the following resources to build your own well-architected, sustainable solutions:

https://oris-connect.com/ https://thinkwithwp.com/architecture/well-architected/ https://docs.thinkwithwp.com/wellarchitected/latest/sustainability-pillar/sustainability-pillar.html https://www.ibm.com/de-de/impact/sustainability https://www.ibm.org/initiatives/environment

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Fabio Braga de Oliveira

Fabio Braga de Oliveira

Fabio Braga de Oliveira is a senior partner solutions architect at AWS based in Munich and a co-author of the book AWS Observability Handbook. He carries a wealth of experience from various industries like automotive, industrial, and financial services, working in the last 20+ years as a software engineer, team lead and solutions architect. His professional interests go from big to small: he loves working with event-driven architectures to help build complex, highly efficient systems, as well as working on small devices, building device fleets to collect data and supporting companies to drive new insights using analytics techniques and machine learning. Currently, he is helping the IBM team in the DACH and Central Eastern European regions with application modernization (serverless, containers) and Internet of Things (IoT) workloads.

Andre Weigelt

Andre Weigelt

André is the Chief Technology Officer at ORIS, bringing over 8 years of expertise in cloud-native platform development and operations. His leadership is instrumental in driving digital business innovations and overseeing technical solutions. With a strong foundation in computer science, André melds his passion for development architecture with a deep interest in DevOps, cloud technologies, and AI trends. His role at ORIS not only underscores his technical acumen but also highlights his commitment to leading-edge digital transformation.

Dhana Vadivelan

Dhana Vadivelan

Dhana Vadivelan is a Solutions Architecture Leader at AWS based in London. He has over 23 years of experience in helping enterprise customers with their IT transformation programs through designing and implementing resilient architectures. He leads a team of senior architects across EMEA and APJ, responsible for driving strategic initiatives with global consulting partners and enabling partners to develop joint solutions, build technical capabilities, and steer them through the execution phase, as customers migrate and modernize their applications to AWS. He is passionate about enabling customers and partners to adopt cloud-native technologies to solve various business challenges and guide them through their transformation journey.

Renaud de Montaignac

Renaud de Montaignac

Renaud is French-Canadian and has a diploma from INSA de Lyon and a PhD of Civil Engineering of Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal. He worked as a Bridge designer and project manager in Montreal for 5 years working on the conception of complex infrastructure projects. He then joined the Innovation center of a major construction material company where he was leading the incubation of a digital solution leveraging civil engineering, Material knowledge and digital technologies to improve design decisions and reduce carbon footprint. In 2021, the project was spun off from the innovation center and Renaud co-founded ORIS with the CEO Nicolas Miravalls.