Focus on the Bouygues Construction R&D use case
In the current pandemic context, in addition to the compulsory health measures on building sites (wearing masks, social distancing, etc.), Bouygues Construction's Research and Development department wanted to go further in terms of prevention and asked Omniscient, which specialises in optimising building sites, to develop an innovative IoT solution that would enable them to continue their activity while safeguarding the health of operators. In this context, Omniscient once again relied on the Kuzzle IoT platform.
Based on the use case identified by Bouygues Construction's R&D team, the Omniscient teams opted for an original approach: real-time measurement of traffic flow by zone so that they can act quickly if the traffic exceeds the limit and adapt the organisation of the worksite.
Social distancing is already ensured by wearing a mask, so existing technological solutions for measuring the distance between two people do not add anything more. The challenge, in this case, is above all to limit or regulate the grouping of employees with an approach based on prevention and with little intrusiveness at the employee level.
Prevention through indoor geolocation technologies
In practice, Omniscient provides on-site teams with anonymised key data on the number of visitors for on-site area, accessible in real-time from the platform and the app thanks to connected chips installed on the badges taken in the morning by operator. These chips communicate wirelessly at 2.4 GHz with a network of connected, stand-alone removable tags installed in the ceiling of each zone, providing a real-time view of traffic and traffic flow. The badges have an autonomy of around 12 months.
Anonymised data is used in 3 complementary ways:
- Preventive mode: display of results in real-time at the entry of each zone on a tablet as a preventive measure. The display principle encourages companions not to enter if the maximum threshold is reached.
- Reactive mode: if the threshold is exceeded for fifteen minutes, a supervisor is notified by e-mail or text and can intervene.
- Analysis mode: in just a few clicks, the site management and the health and safety team can find the attendance history by zone and by day on a dashboard. This enables them to assess whether the measures are being properly complied with and, if necessary, to adjust the organisation or schedules (morning arrivals, meal times, etc.) to eliminate recurring peaks. Historical records also make it possible to provide third parties with factual information on the operation of the distance measures implemented.
A 5-week development
The technical challenge was to find a technology capable of managing the entry and exit of zones in real-time, as Nicolas Lemaire, co-founder of Omniscient, explains. “On average, the server receives a location every 1.3 seconds. It is therefore necessary to constantly count the number of chips seen per zone. This is where the functionalities of the Kuzzle IoT platform have helped us a lot.”
The Kuzzle IoT platform allows you to create particularly complex backend functionalities in record time. The project teams used the Koncorde real-time filter engine created by Kuzzle for geofencing, and available natively in the eponymous IoT platform. Within a single platform, Kuzzle IoT offers a multi-protocol API toolbox, advanced functionalities, powerful multi-device, multi-network IoT compatible tools to meet a wide range of use cases, while guaranteeing a level of security and total control of the platform. Jacques Le Conte, CEO of Kuzzle says "The uniqueness of the Kuzzle IoT offer is to allow ultra-fast project development thanks to a toolbox of the most advanced technologies on the market ready to use. We are talking about weeks of development instead of months.”
This is not the first time the two start-ups have worked together. Last year, they had already developed an on-site geolocation solution. This new feature is an additional brick in the services offered by Omniscient.
