The Asian Development Bank (ADB) worked with ORIS to deliver a sustainable, safer and more resilient upgrade on the A380 route in Uzbekistan

 

ORIS, the first digital materials platform for sustainable roads, is working with the Asian Development Bank’s program on the A380 route upgrade project in Uzbekistan. This road project is among the Asian Development Bank’s strategic investments with the route being one of the major trade routes in Central Asia and part of the road networks connecting the Caucasian region to Eastern Asia. The A380 also connects the Southern and Western part of Uzbekistan to its neighboring country, Kazakhstan.

 

The Asian Development Bank teams (digital sandbox and transport division) , supported by the Uzbek road committee, have piloted an advanced digital solution ORIS , with the aim of improving the project investment in terms of sustainability, costs, resilience to climate change and safety performance. Supported by the latest Artificial Intelligence, ORIS enables comparative road design analysis for an optimized result, balancing performance, costs and environmental impact. 

The comparative alternative designs have been delivered with the view of improving 5 features:

• Costs: The analysis integrates local sourcing options, to improve costs and sustainability with the best road foundations and pavement scenario in the given context. 

• Carbon footprint: A full life cycle assessment is conducted in ORIS with a comprehensive carbon emission over all project phases (construction, maintenance and use phase). 

• Circularity: The pavement iterations optimize the use of local materials and integrate recycling options, to reduce consumption of primary natural resources, including water consumption.
• Resilience and Durability: The analysis includes extreme climate  weather events modeling, and challenges to resilience and durability, based on climate scenarios and risks exposure.
• Safety: Road safety preliminary assessment was performed using the iRap methodologies, with recommendations to reach international safety standards. ORIS highlights current main hazards in terms of curvature, slopes and visibility of equipment on the road.

“We are extremely proud to be working with the Asian Development Bank and the Uzbek road committee on the A380 project in Uzbekistan. We are convinced of the need to deliver better road infrastructures, safer and more resilient, through a collaborative approach with all actors of the road ecosystem. We are delighted that a major international public financing organization such as ADB has chosen to work with us as a major step towards building its sustainable road investment portfolio” explains Nicolas Miravalls, CEO of ORIS.

 

Pawan Karki, Asian Development Bank transport specialist emphasizes: “Thanks to all innovations embedded and the quick and numerous digital iterations performed through ORIS, the A380 project is shaped to align with Paris Accords. We have discovered a new capacity to comply with the highest climate requirements of ADB in terms of the project’s resilience, its carbon emission, mitigation and adaptation measures”.

 

The intelligent digital platform for road design and construction

On 15 February 2022, ITD and CWTC jointly conducted a Webinar on The intelligent digital platform for road design and construction. The platform developed by ORIS analyzes and compares various road design scenarios considering resource availability, environmental impact and climate change impact. ORIS’s innovations on climate change, road safety,  cost effectiveness and sustainability specific to a proposed section of A380 25 km road project in Uzbekistan was discussed. The program, funded through Asian Development Bank’s Digital sandbox program was targeted to showcase digital innovations in road design, construction and maintenance. Asian Development Bank’s Ozzeir Khan, director, ITIA opened the session and Pawan Karki Principal Transport Specialist moderated the webinar. Over 90 plus participants from executing agencies, transport officials, CWTC and RM staff, and consultants along with the ORIS experts were present at the event.