This year, we want to reach out to the brightest entrepreneurs and researchers to help us address the challenge of Ferrovial Agroman, our business unit dedicated to the construction of civil and industrial works:

How can we better understand and characterise the land on which we are building on in order to optimize the design, planning and execution of construction sites?

Context

The world and technology are evolving at a rapid rate. The same is true of the construction industry. Specifically, for those professionals whose work involves a comprehensive understanding of the land on which to build, technology is taking a step forward.

The techniques that have so far been used to analyse these areas are not sufficient. They do not provide us with the necessary information to feed the current numerical models with which we can know the impact that land will have on the execution of the work. This lack of information continually forces us to react to unforeseen events and to manage high levels of uncertainty. For example, we may discover in the middle of a project that the tunneling work is causing cracks in nearby houses, or that the drainage of an aquifer is leaving entire neighbourhoods without water for hours.

To avoid these surprises, we at Ferrovial Agroman need to be able to measure in advance parameters such as the permeability of the ground, the storage coefficient, its resistance or its elasticity, for example.

How can we measure these and other parameters more precisely and specifically for each piece of land, to optimize the design, planning and execution of construction projects?

Specific objectives:

• To know more data about the land than what we are obtaining from traditional collection methods (tests, surveys, etc.).
• To reduce uncertainty on the ground using new processes and measurement techniques.
• To broaden knowledge about the different behaviours of the land.
• To apply new tools and technologies that benefit the construction industry.