Hello, infrastructure leaders and operators,
Most infrastructure projects still calculate climate risk after the design is locked in. By then, adaptation often means millions in costly retrofits.
Last week, I had the privilege of presenting in a virtual event on how we're changing this equation through a project in beautiful Nepal. Using the Siddhartha Highway rehabilitation as a live example of what becomes possible when digitalisation meets climate science.
Our Project Director, Hugo, visited Nepal for this mission
The Siddhartha Highway project faced a complex challenge: 150 km of mountainous terrain, exposed to heat waves, wildfires, landslides, and earthquakes. Traditional climate assessments would take weeks of manual analysis across disconnected tools.
Through ORIS' digital approach, the project team:
The result: A comprehensive climate-proofed design, completed in a fraction of the traditional timeframe, with Paris Agreement alignment confirmed before construction begins.
Ever wondered what time you could get back when using AI on infrastructure projects? As we kept hearing one question from day one: "How much will ORIS Materials Intelligence actually save us?", we decided this month to build (with AI also) a simple calculator that answers exactly that.
Enter: your team size, location, projects per engineer and carbon calculations per project.
Get immediate answers: time saved, financial impact and full breakdown
Try it yourself – it takes 2 minutes, no signup required.
At this month's Autodesk Rail Summit in Madrid, one theme dominated conversations: BIM is driving deep sector transformation.
For railway infrastructure specifically, BIM has become the foundation for effective collaboration across all disciplines, from initial design through operations. But here is where it gets exciting (well, if you're an engineer at heart I guess): we're now seeing BIM evolve beyond geometry and scheduling into the "carbon dimension" or level 6 for the aficionados.
At ORIS, we have developed a way to create a project inside ORIS by directly uploading a BIM file and using AI to map materials and quantities to ORIS' databases. This open BIM module lets engineers run carbon assessments as naturally as they check structural calculations, iterating through design options to find the optimal balance of performance, cost, and environmental impact.
The infrastructure industry has always been about managing impossible equations. Durability vs. cost, performance vs. resources, speed vs. safety. Digital tools don't make these equations easy... but they make them solvable.
Let's act now for sustainable infrastructure!