Best Automation Project: V.M. Salgaocar & Bros' RFID & NFC Enabled Truck Transportation System Using GPRS

A unique solution using GPRS mobiles and RFID cards to maintain a collective evaluation of all trucks, their load, and their movement between iron mines and processing plants.

Thursday, June 30, 2011

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VM Salgaocar & Bros is a mining company in Goa, that uses tipper trucks to carry iron ore from mines to processing plants covering an average distance of 25 km. Each truck used to be issued a manual slip at four major locations between the mine and the plant. Tracking data from these slips was a challenge as one can imagine. Several attempts at automating the process had failed in the past.

What was deployed

The company finally decided to deploy GPRS based NFC mobiles at each of the loading/unloading sites, and issued RFID cards to all its truck drivers. They eliminated manual issuing of slips at each location and even stopped using computers and networks. The real motive behind the implementation was to create a centralized database with all information about the movement and efficiency of trucks.

One of the challenges that the management faced during implementation was non-availability of reliable and consistent GPRS signals at remote mines. After signing up with Vodafone, they installed 'COW' (cell on wheels) stations at the mines, and now they are able to provide a reliable GPRS signal for the RFID operation.

The project ensures capturing of the entire process involving loading and weighing accurately by reading the passive RFID tags of trucks. This records every transportation trip's data, accurately merging trips along 'data generating' phases and reporting online and simulating the same for trip transportation monitoring to the stake-holders in 'near' real-time manner. This eliminated the time and efforts required for data entry, collating, re-verification and later processing reports by the IT department.

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