J1939 Telematics: Dashboards, KPIs and Predictive Maintenance
Case Studies / Meridian Generic Rail Limited
Meridian Generic Rail Limited
Meridian Generic Rail Limited is a UK-based company offering comprehensive rail services, including engineering, project management, and maintenance.
What problem did you solve?
We currently have eight DAF XF E6 trucks in a logistics company in Zimbabwe. We need to collect GPS, IMU and CAN bus data from these vehicles and feed the data back to the company to improve our services.
The purpose is to plan maintenance and interventions ahead of time - and enable us to analyze and adjust driver behavior towards a more efficient and ecological driving style.
How did you solve it?
The data is collected by the CANedge3 and sent via LTE to our Amazon S3 bucket. Here we deploy the Grafana-Athena integration: When new data is uploaded, it is automatically decoded by an AWS Lambda function using our J1939 DBC and the CANedge GPS/IMU DBC. The resulting Parquet files are written to another S3 bucket in our AWS account. The Parquet data lake can then be accessed via Grafana dashboards using the Amazon Athena plugin.
The whole workflow was built from the step-by-step guides by CSS Electronics with small adjustments. We also deployed an automated PDF report generation (you can find an example PDF below the Grafana dashboard screenshots).
"The CANedge3 is an excellent piece of hardware paired with excellent software and support from the CSS team"
Example from MGRL's Grafana dashboards (more
examples).
What benefit has this led to?
We have been able to analyze the performance of the vehicles and drivers. Specifically, we can now verify the fuel economy of any routes and compare them against benchmarks. We can also extract KPI data for visualizing the performance of the vehicles and business overall. Finally, the setup allows us to investigate faults, incidents and accidents - helping us perform root cause analysis and attribution successfully.
Why did you choose the CANedge3?
It is a small device, capable of being installed anywhere in the truck - with all the functionality required for our application. It is reliable, easy to work with and can be configured/updated from anywhere in the world. CSS Electronics also provides excellent guides for the whole implementation process, making the deployment quick and easy.
— Fernando Pereira, Head of Technical Services, MGRL
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