About the project
Dozens of dump trucks travel daily from the quarry where coal is mined, to the seaport. The lips of overloaded trucks are a fairly common occurrence there. The peculiarity of this place is that mobile communication is only present in seaport, and the majority of mining machinery works outside the network coverage area.
None of the integrator-companies took this project due to its extremely far location.
Challenges
It was important to ensure regular monitoring of equipment:
- fuel consumption control;
- the volume of coal transported record;
- registration of accurate data of the dump trucks flip cases on the way to the seaport.
An additional complication was that such mining equipment as bulldozers, excavators and large-capacity dump trucks do not leave the quarry and never happen to be into the GSM zone. For those machines enormous fuel consumption and the risk of a flipping is very common.
Solution
As a test sample, the integrator equipped 5 units of machinery with Base Block Wi-Fi Hub trackers.
This device collects data from other tracking devices in the area with poor GSM signal and then transfers data to the monitoring server in the network coverage area.
Firstly, engineers equipped a bulldozer and fuel tankers, in other words those vehicles that operate in the constant absence of GSM signal. Also the trackers were installed on dump trucks that regularly entering the network coverage area.
First results were received by a tanker that was equipped with a fuel delivery sensor integrated with Base Block device. Thanks to this, engineers were able to see the fuel delivery data control spending. So, 6 tons of fuel were saved during a week. As a result, the client made the decision to fully equip the fleet with the monitoring system. After that, all bulldozers, excavators and mining trucks were set to "Client" mode, and tankers with dump trucks to “Hub” mode. Thus, machines in “Hub” mode collected data from mining equipment, and upon arrival at the port transferred their data and data collected from other vehicles to the server.
