ALICE Technologies for Construction Planners

In-Depth Review

ALICE Technologies is built around one observation: construction planners almost always build a single project schedule rather than evaluate a range of sequence alternatives. The reason is practical — developing and comparing five or ten serious schedule alternatives manually in Primavera P6 or Microsoft Project takes weeks of planner time that preconstruction teams rarely have. ALICE replaces that process with simulation, generating thousands of schedule alternatives based on user-defined constraints and surfacing the options that perform best on cost, duration, or both.

What ALICE Actually Does

The core function is schedule simulation, not schedule management. A planner defines the work activities, durations, dependencies, and available resources — labor crews, equipment, material delivery constraints — and ALICE runs through the possible sequences at a scale that manual planning cannot approach.

The optioneering output is a cost-vs-duration scatter plot showing where each simulated schedule lands. The Pareto frontier on that chart — the options where you cannot improve cost without increasing duration, or reduce duration without increasing cost — is what the platform is designed to surface. A planner can select any point on that frontier, inspect the underlying sequence, and decide whether it makes physical sense on the actual project site.

BIM integration is the mechanism that gives the activity list its foundation. Rather than a planner manually estimating quantities and building a work breakdown structure from scratch, the model geometry drives the takeoffs. An update to the model propagates into the activity list rather than requiring a separate manual update cycle. This does not fully automate the WBS development — a planner still has to map model elements to activities and define sequences — but it removes the most error-prone step in early-stage schedule development.

Resource-constrained scheduling is where ALICE diverges most sharply from standard CPM practice. Most construction schedules are built assuming resources are available when the schedule calls for them. ALICE requires planners to define actual resource pools and enforces those constraints during simulation. The result is a schedule that reflects real supply assumptions rather than optimistic ones. This tends to surface bottlenecks — a single crane, a limited concrete crew, a constrained excavation window — that would not appear until the project is under way in a conventionally built schedule.

Sensitivity analysis lets planners adjust specific assumptions and see how changes propagate. Reducing available ironworker crew size by 20 percent, for example, will cascade through the simulation and show the duration and cost impact across all scenarios. This gives preconstruction teams a quantified basis for risk conversations with owners rather than a qualitative “schedule risk” notation on a Gantt chart.

Pricing Reality

ALICE Technologies does not publish pricing. The platform targets contractors and construction managers on large projects, and pricing reflects that. Expect enterprise-level contract discussions, not a self-serve subscription. Request a demo and a pricing conversation early if you are evaluating against the cost of additional planner headcount or manual optioneering work.

One Thing to Test Before Committing

Bring a real project from your recent history — one where the schedule ran into resource constraints or required replanning mid-project. Use that project’s activity list and actual resource constraints to run a simulation during the demo or pilot. Compare the ALICE output sequences against what your planners developed manually. If the platform surfaces sequences your team did not consider, and those sequences are physically valid, you have concrete evidence of the value it would add on future bids. If the outputs look identical to what your team would have built anyway, the case for the cost is weaker.

Who This Is For

General contractors and construction managers on complex commercial, civil, or infrastructure projects are the target users. The platform’s value scales with project complexity: more activities, more resource interdependencies, and higher schedule risk all increase the return on the simulation capability. A highway interchange contractor or a healthcare general contractor managing a complex phased construction sequence will get more from ALICE than a ground-up office building contractor with a straightforward schedule.

Subcontractors who receive schedules from GCs rather than developing them, residential builders with simple sequences, and teams without dedicated preconstruction planners are not the right fit. The platform requires someone who understands scheduling logic well enough to set up valid constraints and validate that the outputs make physical sense. Without that, the simulation produces optimized answers to the wrong question.