Bouygues Travaux Publics Adopts IoT-Enabled Traceability Solution, UBY Soil, Powered by Abeeway Trackers

Press Release – Paris, France – Sep 28, 2023. Read the press release in French here. 

Bouygues Travaux Publics, offshoot of one of the biggest global construction groups Bouygues Construction, specialized in civil engineering and related structures, deployed UBY Soil, an IoT-powered solution monitoring in real time the evacuation of spoil from construction sites.

The UBY Soil solution, backed by Abeeway’s multi-technology sensors and LoRaWAN® network technology, helps streamline, speed up and secure the creation of digital spoil tracking forms while also locating and tracing the fleet of hundreds of trucks involved in spoil removal for Bouygues Travaux Publics. The UBY Soil solution comprises a mobile and tablet-optimized application (iOS, Android) and a web-based dashboard for real time spoil tracking, reporting and configuration (adding, editing, configuring sensors).

This initiative aligns with another IoT project already deployed by Bouygues Construction, in which over 20,000 pieces of equipment are being tracked using LoRaWAN technology.

The Challenges of Managing Construction Waste  

Regulatory changes have made the management of excavated material a priority for all construction sites in France, and notably all the worksites of the ‘Grand Paris Express’ metro project. The spoil that leaves the construction site has the status of waste and must be disposed of in the planned landfill sites.

For instance, The Grand Paris Express construction sites generate millions of tons of waste, in all categories of pollution (inert, non-dangerous, dangerous). The challenge for the construction sites is not only in the amount and diversity of spoil, but also in providing full traceability of excavated material to the final outlet. The project owner, as the person responsible for the burial or repurposing of the waste produced within the framework of his project, needs a tool that guarantees this traceability.

Locating and Monitoring Evacuation

Bouygues Travaux Public worked initially with various subsidiaries of Bouygues Group (e-Lab, the Group’s R&D entity, C2S, the Bouygues IT and software development subsidiary), to develop UBY Soil. Abeeway’s smart multi-technology geolocation devices were selected to complete the solution. It also includes a mobile/tablet application and an IT solution that processes the data transmitted in real time. You can see a detailed video of the solution here.

UBY Soil is part of the UBY family of solutions, designed and developed by construction industry experts to help general contractors and infrastructure operators tackle their environmental, productivity, health, and safety challenges.

UBY Soil ensures the traceability of spoil from the moment it is excavated and loaded onto a truck, to when it leaves the site and all through its journey until it is deposited at an approved collection site. To date, it has been deployed for 3 different projects covering many “Grand Paris Express” construction sites, but also on smaller sites in the Paris region and in the South-West of France. 

Abeeway devices work perfectly outdoors as well as indoors thanks to their multi-technology geolocation system, integrating GPS, Low-power GPS (patented), WiFi Sniffing and Bluetooth Low Energy. Also offering years of battery life, intelligently configured multimodal behavior and advanced location resolution algorithms, Abeeway trackers provide geolocation intelligence for a wide range of use cases, in construction, industry and the supply chain.

Thanks to contactless NFC tags embedded on the Abeeway sensors attached to the truck dumpster, the operator can create and fill in the spoil tracking slip with the UBY Soil application in a couple of taps before the truck leaves the site of origin. The digitized slip is uploaded to the secure server, sent in an email and displayed on the mobile device if asked for.

Throughout its journey, the truck’s position is communicated through LoRaWAN® network technology. This widely used wireless protocol makes use of an unlicensed radio spectrum and allows battery-powered sensors to communicate with IoT applications across a long-range while also consuming ultra-low power.

Upon arrival at the destination site, the inclinometer detects the bucket movement and records the exact location of the unloading. All the information is summarized and can be consulted on the UBY Soil dashboard. An alert system instantly detects a possible destination error to guarantee optimum traceability of the excavated material. 

This process simplifies the traceability process of the excavated material: all the regulatory information is integrated in real time in the monitoring documents. And the impact of these operations is greatly reduced by the digitization of the process of creating the Waste Tracking Document.

The solution also makes it possible to monitor the duration of the trucks’ journeys, and consequently, to optimize their rotation.

Photo of Olivier Hersent

«Our collaboration with Bouygues Travaux Publics showcases the power of IoT in promoting sustainable practices in construction. Abeeway’s geolocation devices offer precise traceability of excavated materials, reinforcing environmental responsibility and regulatory compliance.»

Olivier Hersent, CEO at Actility

About Bouygues Travaux Publics

Bouygues Travaux Publics is one of the global leaders in regeneration and sustainable infrastructures. As a subsidiary of Bouygues Construction specialised in civil engineering and related structures, the company has skills and recognised expertise in underground works, river and maritime works, linear projects, industrial civil engineering, earthworks and surface mining. From Hong Kong to Canada, Bouygues Travaux Publics has completed numerous iconic projects: the Channel Tunnel, the Brest tramway, the Beirut seafront, the A28 and A41 motorways, the Ile de Ré and Normandy bridges, Chernobyl’s New Safe Confinement arch, Cairo and Sydney undergrounds, and over 10 tunnels in Hong Kong. Throughout the world, men and women in our company are all committed to innovating and creating value for our clients.

www.bouygues-construction.com

About UBY

UBY is a construction tech company leveraging state-of-the art technology and data to help tackle the environmental, health and safety, productivity and durability challenges that construction and infrastructure management professionals are facing. UBY solutions provide alerts and actionable data that help steer any operation in real time by providing the right information at the right moment to help make the right decisions. UBY solutions, developed by a multi-disciplinary R&D team, are currently providing essential operational information to hundreds of professionals on over 120 operations in France, the UK, the USA, Australia and Hong Kong, with support of local UBY teams.

More information on www.uby-group.com

About Abeeway

Abeeway is the market leader in low-power indoor & outdoor fused geolocation and a provider of disruptive IoT tracking solutions worldwide. Abeeway offers the most energy-efficient, reliable and flexible geolocation solutions using unique tracking devices and a smart multi-technology location system optimized for long-range and low-power-consumption leveraging LoRaWAN™ connectivity. Abeeway devices are available on ThingPark Market 

About Actility 

Actility is the world leader in low-power wide-area networks (LPWAN) industrial-grade connectivity solutions for the Internet of Things. Actility provides its ThingPark™ platform and network technology to deploy, operate and maintain public and private wireless IoT networks within a unified, scalable and versatile network infrastructure. The vast majority of nationwide LoRaWAN® network service providers (over 50) and hundreds of enterprises trust ThingPark™ all over the world. Through its subsidiary Abeeway, Actility also provides patented ultra-low power tracking solutions. ThingPark Market offers the largest selection of interoperable IoT gateways, devices and applications to simplify and accelerate deployment of numerous use cases.  

Actility logo