Aku Wilenius
DigiConcrete
Aku Wilenius is the CEO and co-founder of Caidio Oy. He has a more than 20 years of working experience in an international computer-based test and measurement industry. During his career, Aku has collaborated with many of the top global technology companies by providing quality verification solutions to solve their technical and business needs.
His role in DigiConcrete is to make sure that the developed solutions not only solve the measurement challenges but also meet the business requirements of the industry. He is also responsible for the artificial intelligence based development initiative of DigiConcrete.
The problems with the concrete quality are causing unnecessary financial losses and lack of trust in the construction industry. The current building process consists of a multi-phase concrete supply chain in which the information flow through the process is limited. An uncontrolled industrial manufacturing process like this is unusual to any other modern industrial segment. The quality control methods of concrete are also relatively tenured, and require modernization.
In 2017 several major companies and organizations in the Finnish construction industry came together to form a DigiConcrete working group. The purpose of Digiconcrete is to recognize issues in the concrete process and test and develop new ways to solve the discovered challenges. The group has made significant progress and developed several methods to improve the current process.
DigiConcrete is confident that a fundamental improvement in the process is achievable by using modern digital technologies to verify the quality of concrete in every step of the production chain. The first requirement is to store the measurement data from each stage of the process in a single data repository. Analyzing this information from the very beginning of the process to the final construction enables the user to verify the quality of each stage and the whole process as well. The process gets more efficient, and the quality increases when the each phase is well-controlled and tightly synchronized with the whole process.
We envision using novel IoT-sensors and state-of-the-art automatic data analysis paradigms for the quality control. For example, the air content of the concrete should be automatically monitored not only in the factories, but also in the trucks and during the casting and curing phase. The solution detects process anomalies with automatic machine learning based data analysis. Based on the analysis, users will perform corrective actions in the process to fix the detected issues.
In short, we do not only aim to digitize the information flow but revolutionize the concrete construction with IoT-sensors, machine learning based data-analysis and artificial intelligence fueled concrete construction assistant.
The next step in the project is to develop a proof-of-concept demonstrator of the concept. In this demonstration application, we will be focusing on studying three central ideas:
- Improve the communication and information flow in the concrete construction process with digital solutions
- Develop sensors and new IoT measurement technologies for automatic and continuous concrete quality monitoring from the concrete manufacturing to the ready construction
- Experiment machine learning based data-analysis combined with AI-fueled concrete construction assistant
The progress of DigiCongrete has gained much interest in the social media and the press. In this presentation, we will update the audience of the progress we have made and the results we have obtained.
