Smartrail

Rail-bound mining - Loco and hopper production monitoring

Tracking and Weighing

Smartrail is our fully OEM-agnostic solution designed for rail-bound mining operations using trains to transport raw materials. Smartrail combines tracking and weighing capabilities with the primary goal of optimising production. Locomotives, hoppers, ore chute boxes, and tips are tagged to continuously monitor the exact load and tip location for each vehicle. The bi-directional in-motion weighbridge provides highly accurate measurements, taking both full and empty readings into account when calculating the exact payload of each hopper for every trip.

Production and Productivity

The system's objective is to increase tonnage, improve grade, and reduce costs by providing management with high-quality information for better decision-making. Before the digitisation of underground production data, it took 8 to 24 hours for hopper tipping information to become available, making it difficult to pinpoint underperformance and manage shifts or sections in real-time. Smartrail now delivers live underground production and productivity figures directly to the surface. Integration with mine planning software also enables compliance measurements.

Engineering and Safety

In addition to production insights, Smartrail offers valuable data on the availability and utilisation of rolling stock used for tramming raw material. It also provides safety metrics, including the braked versus unbraked ratio and the number of hoppers being pulled by each locomotive.

Control Your Operation with Unrivaled Insights

Insights for control

Key levers

Throughput
Costs
Compliance

  • Rate and Capacity Insights to Increase Your Throughput

    Smartrail was developed to perform the core feature of production monitoring extremely well. Continuous automated data is collected and provided on the software platform showing:

    - Tonnage by box, section, level and mine - Availibility and utilisation of locomotives and hoppers

  • Improved Decision-Making Resulting in Cost Savings

    By increasing throughput while ensuring the operation is effective and its processes are efficient, the following waste is removed:

    - Inefficiencies - Bottlenecks caused by excessive train numbers - Opportunity Costs - Costs related to non-compliance

  • Cost-effective Tool Providing You the Actual Performance

    Many hours are spent on long-term planning and short-term scheduling, but the actuals are only available periodically after a tedious survey process. Smartrail provides live actuals and integrates with planning on:

    - In-shift compliance dashboards - Actual vs Call Reports - Actual Performance vs Equipment Specifications