A mining tracking system: smart IoT solution for a mining industry

Problem

Apadana Kavosh, a major company from the Middle East, specializes in mine exploring, extracting, and mineral exporting, and has a fleet of 1,000 vehicles operating on sites and about.

The client had a full list of weak spots, lack of control and data or reports. The company needed to optimize mining equipment tracking for over 100 vehicles by applying smart IoT mining solutions. Here’s what they needed to improve or implement:

• better distribution of dump trucks to excavators, as well for drilling, road construction, and sprinkling water on roads, and optimizing vehicle routes;
• maintenance and repair management as Apadana Kavosh suffered from high costs in these areas;
• more efficient management of parts and materials in warehouses;
• acquiring a full dataset on the fleet operations both for daily tasks control and to base their strategic decisions on;
• controlling the drivers to prevent violations, decrease vehicle wear and tear and follow the safety protocols, as well as managing drivers’ work time;
• controlling instant and total fuel consumption to optimize it, decrease costs and prevent fuel theft.

This is just to name a few of the issues: there were a lot of points for automation, digitization and control in the client’s vast business which would lead to the company’s growth leap. All of them could be sorted out with a thought-out mining tracking system.

Solution

The Wialon partner Giti Gostar Rahbord (GGRCO) has implemented a project that fully covers the client’s need in advanced mining GPS systems and brings all that IoT offers for a mining industry.

Hardware

First, the service provider installed GalileoSky 7X Wi-Fi devices, fuel sensors, and a new tire pressure monitoring system on the vehicles. This base was supported by a bunch of additional equipment such as contactless readers to collect even more data on the fleet performance.

Software

The data from the devices and the CAN-BUS (which was additionally decoded as the vehicle brand used onsite had a proprietary protocol not compliant with the global standards) is sent to Wialon, the GPS tracking system. This data is shown and used in many ways:

• the customer now monitors vehicle location, CAN-BUS parameters, data about extraction, views reports on carried weight, traveled distance and time, number of cycles, etc. Now mining equipment tracking gives the 360 view of the fleet operations;
• Eco-Driving is used for controlling drivers’ violations based on parameters from 3D accelerometers, CAN-BUS, weight, tire pressure and temperature; this allows not only to save money on maintenance and repair, but also contributes to better driving on sites, avoiding accidents and making the work a safer place for drivers and other staff;
• controlling the tire pressure plays a huge role in saving money on spare parts, maintenance works and such, which is particularly important for expensive mining equipment and its costly spare parts.

GGRCO developed a custom mining tracking system on top of the telematics data that consists of several modules:

• Manual and automatic dispatch management system. The module allows for more efficient and controlled dispatching of mining machines for drilling, extraction and road construction. In addition, route optimization was performed since previously there was no map of mine sites;
• Planning and executing maintenance to reduce idle time and increase the vehicle lifespan;
• Warehouse management of parts and materials for proper inventory tracking;
• A drilling dispatching module with the possibility of measuring and controlling drilling patterns and drilling depth;
• Road construction dispatching to manage temporary roads and road repair.

These modules are interconnected for deeper automation: for example, maintenance and warehouse modules are integrated with each other as maintenance activities utilize spare parts and materials stored in warehouses.

The client’s site with vehicles controlled by the implemented mining tracking system

During the project implementation, the service encountered and successfully overcame the typical yet uneasy challenges of working in the mining industry, such as lack of electricity or network coverage, harsh weather conditions, as well as global semiconductors shortage and COVID-19.

The service provider offers customer support during the working hours and has conducted training for customer’s employees, including sessions on hardware troubleshooting. This ensures the client’s vast staff is well-prepared for using the solution to its most.