Semifinished Vehicles Locating
Direct tracking of commercial and special vehicles' journey in production line
The solution proposed by Ubiquicom uses a mix of GPS, WiFi and BLE technologies to localize the vehicles with a high level of accuracy outdoors, inside warehouses and at critical points.
The customer is one of the most important global leaders in the capital goods sector which, through its various businesses designs, manufactures and markets machines for farming and earthworks, trucks, commercial vehicles, buses and special vehicles, as well as a large range of powertrain applications. The company has branches, production factories and R&D centres in 180 countries and employs more than 60,000 people.
The requirements
The customer needed a hardware and software solution for locating and tracking vehicles inside the factory with the triple aim of monitoring the flows of vehicles used indoors which feed and supply the production lines, tracking the supplier’s vehicles which enter the factory to unload the incoming materials and locate the production vehicles in order to have a real-time picture of the progress for every semi-finished product.
The solution proposed by
UBIQUICOM
Ubiquicom proposed a solution based on the Ubiquicom uTag3 which, by using a mix of GPS, WiFi, and BLE technologies, enables the vehicles to be located with a high level of accuracy outdoors, inside warehouses and even at critical points (for example, inside the cabins of the roller benches or painting ovens).
The uTag3 is particularly suitable for this scenario thanks to the extremely long duration battery, which enables the movements of the vehicles to monitor for many months before recharging, and the capacity to withstand extreme temperatures (of up to 80°C, which may be found in painting ovens). The uTag3 tags are linked with the vehicle nameplate using the NFC tag present inside and using the APIs of the Locator platform by which the following functions are used:
- searching for a vehicle by nameplate and extraction of a list of vehicles by zone
- displaying spaghetti charts for analyzing flows a posteriori for optimization purposes
- generating reports on the stationary times in the various zones
- generating alarms in the case of a stationary time of a vehicle inside the factory which is too long.
In order to optimize the process and prevent the tags from being lost, an alarm has been configured, using geofencing functions on the tag, which, if the tag leaves the factory, activates audio and visual signaling and vibration of the tag, so that the driver of the vehicle is aware of the fact.
Results
A fleet of 80 uTag3 tags is currently used for monitoring the indoor flows and the incoming vehicles of the suppliers. The accuracy found during the test phases fully satisfied the customer and the process of linking tags to the incoming vehicles and returning them from the outgoing vehicles was studied in order to reduce to a minimum the possibilities of error and the impact in terms of time necessary. The expansion of the project to the vehicles in production and use of the version of the uTag3 tags with eInk display in order to manage the automatic assignment of the loading bay to the incoming vehicles is currently being evaluated.
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