The mining industry heavily relies on commercial vehicles to ensure efficient operations and maximum productivity. These vehicles play a crucial role in transporting materials, equipment, and personnel within mining areas. However, managing a fleet of mining vehicles poses significant challenges, including monitoring and managing uptime, optimizing fleet utilization, and ensuring overall operational efficiency.
In the world of mining, there’s a growing buzz about finding new ways to work smartly and efficiently. The challenge is to ensure big machines like excavators and trucks can work together smoothly.
In mining operations, excavators and vehicles maneuver through a complex web of zones, from active excavation areas to designated parking lots. However, this lack of coordination leads to inefficiencies, accidents, and operational delays, and similar incidents have already been witnessed in the past. Vehicles have encroached into excavation zones, leading to both safety hazards and resource wastage.
Moreover, this haphazard approach hampered dispatch management due to traffic congestion and elongated turnaround times. These issues had quantifiable consequences, including a 15% reduction in operational efficiency and a 20% increase in vehicle-related accidents.
To address these challenges, Zeliot introduced Condense, an LCNC (Low Code No Code), a click-to-deploy managed IoT platform offered through cloud marketplaces, to seamlessly develop mining-industry-specific applications.
This use case study gives an in-depth look into the heart of modern mining, showing how an intelligent solution with real-time data streaming can ensure massive improvements. From the dusty depths of the mines to the decision-making offices, the goal is to make mining safer, more productive, and even better for the environment.
Navigating Complexity: The Landscape of Challenges in the Mining Industry
Mining companies encounter numerous challenges while effectively managing their fleet of commercial vehicles. One of the primary concerns revolves around the monitoring and management of vehicle uptime to minimize downtime and maximize productivity across a vast number of vehicles located in different areas.
Unplanned maintenance or breakdowns can result in significant delays and heightened expenses. Furthermore, optimizing fleet utilization is crucial for ensuring efficient vehicle operations, reducing idle time, and enhancing overall productivity.
As a result, it necessitates the need for a robust infrastructure capable of handling a substantial volume of data from multiple data sources. Additionally, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in the mining commercial vehicle industry need to roll out customer-centric features to enhance on-field vehicle operations and improve the overall mining experience.
Here’s a tabular breakdown of the needs and respective current challenges in the mining industry:
Breaking the Barriers of Mining Industry with Condense’s IoT Platform Solutions
Zeliot’s Condense, a verticalized mobility IoT platform provides a comprehensive answer to the barriers which mining companies face in managing their commercial fleet. It’s a low code no code, click-to-deploy managed mobility data orchestration platform offered through cloud marketplaces. This platform enables the ingestion of real-time data from millions of edge devices securely. It validates the data, provisions the edge devices, and facilitates seamless cloud-to-edge device communication.
Zeliot’s expertise in mobility comes to the fore with its provision of ready-to-use modules alongside Condense. These modules introduce a variety of features that comprehensively elevate mining fleet operations, magnifying safety, operational efficiency, and overall productivity.
Key Features:
Geofencing and Access Control
Implementation of geofencing technology to create virtual boundaries around excavation zones. Only authorized vehicles and equipment can enter specific areas, preventing accidental encroachments, and ensuring a safer work environment.
Real-Time Tracking and Visualization
The system integrates GPS and RFID technologies to track the location and movement of all excavators and vehicles in real time.
A user-friendly interface displays the mining site layout with color-coded zones, enabling operators to monitor activities and detect any unauthorized entry.
Intelligent Routing and Dispatch Management
The system employs predictive analytics and AI algorithms to recommend optimal routes for each vehicle and excavator. This minimizes traffic congestion, reduces turnaround times, and enhances overall operational efficiency. Dispatch managers receive real-time suggestions to make informed decisions.
Additionally, manual route planning can be implemented with geofencing to assist drivers in adhering to the designated route. Any deviations from the planned route within the geofenced areas can be tracked in real-time. So, whenever an event of a geofence breach occurs, a real-time alert can be generated and reported.
Automated Alerts and Notifications:
When a vehicle or excavator enters a restricted or active excavation zone, the system triggers automated alerts to relevant stakeholders, including operators, supervisors, and drivers. These alerts prompt immediate corrective actions and prevent safety hazards and resource wastage.
Driver and Fleet Mapping
Enabling an access control system that links drivers to specific vehicles facilitates the process of assigning vehicles and aligning drivers with their designated shifts. This system ensures that access is granted exclusively to vehicles that have been pre-approved and onboarded by the fleet manager.
Moreover, this access control mechanism serves the vital purpose of restricting unauthorized personnel from entering vehicles located in hazardous areas.
Only individuals who have undergone specialized training are permitted to access and operate these specific vehicles. It’s important to note that vehicle operation is only allowed once a trip has been officially assigned; otherwise, alerts can be generated for such events to enable quick preventive action.
Performance Analytics and Reporting
The system collects data on vehicle movements, operational patterns, and efficiency metrics. Detailed reports are generated such as Fleet utilization reports, Delay/ Miss reports in trip plans, incident reports, Total km covered reports, Driver-wise reports, and customized reports based on operational requirements, providing insights into performance trends, and potential bottleneck areas for improvement.
Emergency Response Integration
The system includes an emergency override feature that allows operators to remotely halt vehicles and equipment in case of a safety threat. This ensures swift action to prevent accidents or hazardous situations.
Advantages of using Zeliot’s Condense and FMS (Fleet Management Solution) Modules
For Mining companies
By utilizing Condense’s IoT platform solution, mining companies can gain real-time visibility into their fleets’ trips and utilization. They can monitor vehicles’ locations, performance metrics, fuel consumption, and other relevant parameters. This visibility allows fleet operators to make informed decisions to optimize routes, allocate resources efficiently, and identify potential issues before they escalate.
Furthermore, Zeliot’s Condense and ready-to-use, off-the-shelf solution module enables the rollout of exciting customer-centric features for on-field vehicles.
These features could include enhanced safety systems, real-time diagnostics, predictive maintenance capabilities, and remote assistance. By offering such features, mining companies can improve overall operational efficiency, enhance the driving experience, and ensure a safe working environment for their employees.
For OEMs of Commercial Vehicle
To monitor and manage fleet uptime, Zeliot’s Condense IoT platform-based solution utilizes Condense Edge, a modular low-memory footprint embedded firmware.
This firmware enables the collection and transfer of rich datasets generated by the vehicles, including data from vehicle ECUs (Electronic Control Units). Also, it facilitates cloud-to-device (C2D) communication to achieve remote upgradation through Over-The-Air (OTA) updates.
The collected data can be analyzed to derive actionable insights aimed at enhancing vehicle performance, implementing failsafe mechanisms, reducing costs, and ensuring high vehicle uptime for the clients.
Business Potential for Condense’s Mobility Data Orchestration Solution
Through market research and analysis, Zeliot has identified a significant business potential for Condense’s mobility data orchestration solution in the mining industry. The approximate number of vehicles per year in the mining sector indicates a substantial market size and growth opportunity for innovative solutions.
By leveraging Condense and its advanced capabilities, mining companies can unlock higher levels of productivity, reduce operational costs, and optimize their fleet management processes.
Wrapping it up,
Zeliot’s Condense IoT platform solution presents a comprehensive and innovative approach to tackle the challenges mining companies have to face while managing their commercial fleets. By harnessing real-time data, advanced data analytics, and customer-centric features, mining companies can optimize fleet uptime, enhance operational efficiency, and elevate overall productivity.
Utilizing Zeliot’s Condense, a verticalized mobility data orchestration platform, mining companies can streamline real-time fleet data and create customized applications that foster success in an increasingly competitive market. Moreover, it will enable them to save costs, gain a competitive edge, and drive operational excellence within the mining industry.