Hitachi Ltd (Hitachi) is a multinational company with operations in sectors such as engineering and electronics, nuclear, transportation and industrial systems. The company manufactures and sells information and telecommunication systems, power systems, social infrastructure and industrial systems, construction machinery, electronic systems and equipment, automotive systems, and smart life and eco-friendly systems. Its products and services find application in various markets, including manufacturing, communications, finance, healthcare and life science, government, energy and transportation, distribution, industry and urban. Hitachi caters its services to global automobile, aerospace, nuclear, and computer industries.
Wenco International Mining Systems Ltd.’s Fleet Management System (FMS), a Hitachi Construction Machinery Group company, provides real-time monitoring of each dump truck to optimise vehicle operation and support efficient mining operations.
FMS has a long history of installation, primarily at open-pit mines around the world. FMS serves as the foundation for Hitachi Construction Machinery’s Autonomous Haulage System (AHS). The system supports mining operations in a variety of ways, from optimising dump truck maintenance to estimating mining quality and yield based on percentages of material or ore content to be produced.
It offers two types of FMS, namely Wencomine and Wencolite.
- Wencomine is a large-scale mine FMS that tracks excavator positions, the number of dump trucks in use, and calculates the volume of materials moved, truck travel speed, and other productivity contributing factors based on values such as material content across loading areas and the targeted yield per fleet pre-loaded prior to operation. All of this information is used to automatically plan efficient loading positions, truck dispatching priorities, and hauling routes in order to ensure material extraction quality and support stabling production.
Aspects such as vehicle fuel consumption and health status can also be tracked to assist a mine in predicting failures. As a result, downtime is reduced, and spare parts and maintenance personnel management are optimised. - Wencolite for small-to-medium-sized mining sites. Because Wencolite does not necessitate a large-scale wireless network infrastructure, operators can keep installation and maintenance costs low while receiving a limited set of essential features such as dump truck tracking, a peer-to-peer communication function between vehicles, and excavators/dump trucks performance reports. These options provide operators with increased safety and productivity while also assisting them in improving overall operational management.