In February this year Zitera in partnership with ICM Group set out to track and monitor the transporting of the world's biggest transformer from Germany to South Africa. This transformer was destined for a new power station that is currently being constructed in the Limpopo province in South Africa, thus the transformer had a significant distance to cover.

The concept of asset tracking is well known to the modern world of logistics and asset management, and with countless products in the market you can put together an asset management system fairly cheaply. However, in this case, the requirements was some what different. There was no 'off the shelf' solution that could be used to achieve what ICM Group had set out to achieve. Thus, ICM approached Zitera to develop a 1st generation tracking system that would be able to track an asset across land and ocean but in addition to the common tracking data such as position, height and speed, the device had to continuously measure the G-forces imposed on the asset.

Now you might be wondering what the significance of measuring the G-forces on an asset might be, it is actually quite simple: since the transformer is such a large, heavy and delicate peace of equipment, any sort of collision during the transportation of such an asset can damage it severely. The cost of repairing such a peace of equipment that is in the field or being transported is phenomenal, thus by measuring the G-forces being imposed on the asset it is possible to have some sort of pre-warning that the asset might be damaged if a large force is measured on the asset. Having such a pre-warning system out on the ocean is invaluable since a lot of costs could be saved if you know that the product has sustained some sort of damage.

Figure 1: The transformer in Rotterdam port, 12 January 2010.

Developing such a robust tracking system came with many engineering challenges especially on the hardware side. The hardware had to meat at least the following requirements:

• Operate reliably in a rugged, 'wet' environment.
• Support multiple communication mediums: GPRS, Sat, Wifi, LAN
• Reliable power supply
• Efficient, light-weight data communication protocol that would be able to extended to include any sort of data in it's payload. 

All data was captured and stored centrally to be accessed and viewed via an on-line web interface. The entire system took about 8 months to engineer and release a beta version; which was called G-Track.

G-Track boasted a simple interface that showed the current position of the asset and allowed you to see the latest G-force data. G-force thresholds were setup on the hardware , and if the threshold was exceeded the hardware would upload a detailed G-force message indicating what had happened in the previous 5 minutes – this was termed a G-Exception.

Figure 2: Screen shot of the G-Track web interface.

The system operated in a semi real-time mode, uploading data periodically in 10 minute intervals however if a G-Exception occurred, the data was sent up immediately. From the G-force data the tracking system could also calculate the orientation of the package and the G-Track interface also allowed an engineer to see the current satellite coverage that the tracking device had out on the ocean.

Figure 3: The transformer as it arrived in Richards Bay, 6 March 2010, after a successful ocean voyage.

The transformer arrived at it's final destination in Limpopo on 8 April 2010 with no incidents en-route and G-Track allowed all engineering staff and ICM logistics planners to continuously monitor the progress of the transformer and most importantly, to see if the transformer sustained any damage.

To say the least, the project was a huge success and Zitera and ICM soon afterwards tracked the transportation of a new rotor for the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station in Cape Town, South Africa with the same G-Track system.

Zitera and ICM are currently in the process of developing the 2nd generation of the G-Track system, called TrackTec, that will boast more advanced features including some of the following:

• Vehicle tracking,Health and Usage Monitoring (HUMS) of vehicles and assets,
• Route planning,
• Trigger based notifications etc.