Bouygues launches ‘major’ IoT project

Bouygues Construction Matériel (BCM) is to install sensors on more than 20,000 pieces of equipment, in an IoT (Internet of Things) project that aims to equip the units with real-time remote management and optimisation capabilities.

A subsidiary of Bouygues Construction, France-based BCM maintains and manages the group’s entire equipment fleet, which is said to number tens of thousands of units.

The IoT project will involve around a hundred employees, who will monitor the equipment across a minimum of five technical bases and over a thousand of the company’s sites. It will use a turnkey solution developed by Omniscient and multi-technology geolocation tracking sensors from Abeeway – a subsidiary of the connective technology company Actility.

The ‘intelligent’ sensors will be installed on Bouygue’s French fleet of bungalows and consoles, its new B20 formwork and on the main components of its tower cranes.

Integrated with patented low-power GPS, the sensors are configured with multimodal behaviour and location resolution algorithms.

Stéphane Sisse, global geolocation services manager at Abeeway, said, “Abeeway technology is adaptive as it can use Wi-Fi in dense urban environment, GPS in the countryside, and BLE indoors, to scan the environment and detect other BLE devices on some small equipment, for example with a tracker placed in a toolbox and BLE tags on each tool.”

Equipped with ‘long life’ batteries that can last for years, the sensors’ GPS data will be processed and analysed by digital specialist Omniscient via its site operations platform.

The platform enables the digital management of an entire fleet and can calculate performance indicators, equipment turnover and utilisation rates. Fleet managers can also inventory the equipment by technical base, worksite or number of billable days.