Boosting Construction Safety Through Industrial Cellular Routers
Background
Construction workers need unparallel levels of safety in hazardous locations. Multiple hazards make for a complex and high-risk environment with potentially fatal outcomes. Monitoring, awareness and threat assessment are time and resource intensive. A comprehensive automated monitoring solution was required to provide worker safety in highly dynamic construction environments.
System Requirements
A customer operating in complex construction environments needed a way to keep workers safe while maintaining productivity and meeting tight deadlines. They also wanted to track company assets to make sure everything was in the right place and oriented correctly. To achieve this, a centralised control room solution was required that could provide real-time safety oversight without relying heavily on manpower.
A specialised application was developed to set and monitor permission and exclusion zones on site. The Advantech ICR-3231W industrial cellular router was deployed to securely and reliably transport data from the site back to the central control room at head office, as well as locally on site, ensuring that critical safety information was always available when it was needed.
For this project, our system requirements were as follows. We needed:
- Local Area Network to Wide Area Network broadband connectivity.
- Local connectivity for Serial RS232/485, Industrial PC and WiFi devices.
- End to End secure transmission by using our WebAccess VPN application for simple deployment of complex virtual networks.
- Zero touch provisioning for easy deployment without requiring technical staff.
Project Implementation
For this project, we implemented a range of solutions designed to improve safety, visibility, and efficiency on site. Our approach combined hardware, software, and connectivity to make sure the team could monitor operations in real time, manage access zones, and track assets reliably. Below is a summary of what we put in place.
- Industrial Cellular Router ICR-3231W for reliable remote connectivity
- WebAccess VPN application providing simple setup of complex Virtual Private Networks
- Centralised monitoring Application
System Diagram
Conclusion
Advantech’s Industrialised Cellular Router was selected by the customer because of the following.
- High resilience industrial platform for tough environments.
- Reliable communications with automated cellular radio connectivity and fail over between 4G LTE, 3G UMTS and 2G GSM. Dual SIM cards providing for multi network operator coverage.
- Easy to use WebAccess VPN application for the simple setup of complex encrypted networks from remote locations to central office.
- Fast broadband communications allowing the customer to provide high levels of safety to the workforce in an efficient and cost saving solution.