Orange Business Services and De Beers Marine South Africa, a division of De Beers, have jointly installed and tested a customised IOT solution to provide geofencing to maintain safe working distances for crew around the heavy machinery involved in marine diamond mining operations.

The new solution was successfully piloted on board the MV Mafuta, currently the world’s largest offshore diamond mining vessel owned and operated by Debmarine Namibia and operating up to 150km off the coast of Namibia, in southern Africa.

According to the companies, the Orange IOT solution was developed in response to De Beers’ ‘zero harm’ objectives. It followed an initial engagement and joint exploratory workshop with the Orange Business Services team in South Africa and focused on IOT technologies, such as Bluetooth Low Energy locators and wearable sensors, as a precision crew locator tool, integrated with on-board antennas and an Orange software engine.

In the pilot, Orange Business Services imported the Mafuta’s AutoCAD files and undertook an on-board site survey to map antenna locations to geofence a predetermined area on the vessel. Ten crew members were equipped with wrist sensors. If one of the crew breached the geofenced area onboard the vessel, the ship’s bridge was alerted immediately.

In a statement De Beers Group Technology SA, an R&D arm of De Beers Group, said it is exploring additional applications, such as a breach alert function to link the sensors directly to the mining machinery via a SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) control system and PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers), to facilitate a failsafe cut-off in the event of a breach in the geofence.

Gerhardus Theron, Vessel Manager of the MV Mafuta said: “Debmarine Namibia has a very clear aim of ‘zero harm’ across all our operations, and we are constantly looking at ways of enhancing employee safety and especially around the heavy machinery required for diamond recovery operations. The initial engagement consultation and joint workshop with the team from Orange Business Services was very productive and quickly identified the potential for an IOT solution to ensure the well-being of personnel on-board the vessels. We quickly moved to a pilot phase, which has now confirmed the potential of this innovative approach that we could embed within our existing safety processes and procedures.”

Keith Matthews, Country Manager for South Africa, Orange Business Services, added: “This smart IOT solution developed with De Beers is a great example of innovating and co-creating with our customer. The geofencing pilot has already proved successful in one of the most challenging heavy industrial environments - a floating diamond mine at sea, with prolonged exposure to strong vibration and corrosive saltwater. The next phase of its development will aim to refine the interface and data collection capabilities, and include testing a trigger function to deactivate machinery in the event of a breach of the geofence by a crew member.”