SAFETY SPOTLIGHT

A recent example was a paving job at an airport in South Dakota where the contractor struggled to achieve compaction. “They’d failed four test strips before reaching out to us,” Wuori said. Once they sent over videos of their rolling pattern, he immediately knew what the issue was: all steel-drum rollers. “On a P209 aggregate base, you need a rubber tire roller to compact it from the bottom up to get 94% density.”

“I’ve been in that exact situation, where I was managing a crew paving at an airport and we didn’t have a rubber tire roller and we struggled hard to get density,” he said. With Wuori’s recommendations, the crew was able to achieve density and passed its fifth and final test strip.

Much of the interest in Pavewise Elite, Wuori said, relates to pre-paving plans. For example, requesting guidance for a particular job with a joint density spec or ride spec. “A lot of Pavewise Elite aims to fix a problem before it costs a company time or money,” he said. “That’s the whole goal behind Pavewise in general: to be proactive.”

An Ai Future

From the very beginning, Pavewise has been built on a machine learning platform. “[My developers] said the concept was so similar to a machine learning model software with the way I’d built my decision engines from the very beginning,” Wuori said. “And that’s how we continue to build it in the future.”

By the third generation of the app, Wuori thinks the platform “is going to be running as a project manager's full time assistant,” he said, “making decisions, reviewing past projects, giving recommendations on logistics and paving, tracking production and efficiency.”

In the future, Wuori hopes to integrate truck and plant logistics solutions into the software “to make it as frictionless as possible,” he said.

“If we increased the quality of the entire asphalt industry in the U.S. by 5%, that would amount to billions of dollars and years of road longevity and quality for the traveling public,” Wuori said. “If this software can help do that for 5-10% of the industry, then it will have done what we hoped it would.”

Pavewise is available now at www.pavewise.pro.