Background and Current Practice

An operator is attached to an excavator throughout his workday. With the help of the foreman and banksman, he gets assigned to tasks that need to be completed with an excavator, and he needs to navigate within the worksite to the specific position to commence work. 

Opportunities and Key Challenges

The utilisation and productivity of the excavators on the construction site could be further optimised with the help of technology to monitor the excavator’s activities. This could support intelligent decision making and better deploy the excavators to their assigned positions at the worksite. Currently, there is limited visibility on the excavator’s activities, and the data needs to be manually collected.

In other words, we are interested in monitoring the behaviour of the operator to gain actionable insights on his performance and fitness for work.

We seek a sensor and/or IoT system which enables the real-time collection of data that can be analysed and conveyed to the foreman or site manager to support better planning of work activities. Another possible value-adding opportunity is to estimate the total volume of land excavated - data that can in turn be reported to the client. 

The proposed solution must be adaptable to various models of excavators to increase the chances of deployment of the solution at scale.

Expected Outcomes

The proposed solution should augment existing excavators to support monitoring of its operator and its operations (activities). The data gathered from monitoring the excavator and/or the operator should be analysed, visualised and reported to the foreman or site manager for review or further action. Ultimately, the solution improves the productivity of the excavators.