Bouygues Travaux Publics, offshoot of global construction groups, Bouygues Construction, has deployed UBY Soil, an IoT-powered solution to monitor the the evacuation of spoil from construction sites in real time.

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 an iOS and Android mobile- and tablet-optimized app, and a web-based dashboard for real-time spoil tracking, reporting and configuration – adding, editing and 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.

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 planned landfill sites.

The challenge for 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.

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.

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), wi-fi 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 uses 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.