Thank you to everyone who has provided feedback about ALICE! We have been listening and working to build the best generative construction simulation solution. Here are the improvements that have been completed in January:

New features

• Ability to add non-3d elements from the edit data table: You can now add placeholder elements (no geometry) without having to upload a new plan. This is done from the edit data table, where you can also assign recipes/supports/properties. You can also edit recipes/supports/properties by selecting the newly created elements from the tree.
  • Benefits: This reduces the planner’s dependency on a BIM resource when it comes to augmenting their plans with things like procurement, permitting, inspections, etc.

• Rounding functionality in operation duration: You can now define rounding rules for operation duration formulas. For example, you can specify that all pours will be rounded up to the nearest day, but all rebar activities will be rounded up to the nearest hour (or half-hour if you so choose).
  • Benefits: This allows planners to leverage parametric duration formulas without having to worry about the possible impractical results they may lead to. This means that fewer recipes need to be made and fewer custom properties need to be manually adjusted. This cuts down planning time and increases schedule reliability and credibility.

• Operation tags: You can now add operation tags to any operation in your recipes. This tag can be later used when building custom Task IDs which is an upcoming feature. In the process, the design of the operation editor component was improved to always display the name of the operation regardless of which tab you’re in.
  • Benefits: This removes the need for users to create single-operation recipes whenever they want a custom property to apply to a specific operation. This also helps with the creation of smart task IDs so that planners and project managers are more easily able to find the activities they need when looking at large schedules.

Improvements

• Speed up task graph construction: The time it takes between opening the explore page and getting new simulation results (aka the spinning “what if” button + time spent “Queued in scheduler…”) was significantly reduced by implementing a new method for building constraints.
• Shorten and sort WBS codes in P6 export: WBS codes in the P6 export are now more presentable and in line with typical formatting.