PARIS, France & JOHANNESBURG, South Africa – Orange Business Services, a network-native digital services company, and De Beers Marine South Africa, a division of De Beers - the world's leading diamond company, have jointly installed and tested a customized IoT solution to provide geofencing to maintain safe working distances for crew around the heavy machinery involved in marine diamond mining operations. The new solution was successfully piloted on board the MV Mafuta, currently the world's largest offshore diamond mining vessel owned and operated by Debmarine Namibia and operating up to 150 km off the coast of Namibia, in southern Africa.

Diamond mining vessels bring crew and heavy machinery into relatively close proximity, and De Beers is committed to ensuring the highest standards of operating safety for all personnel. The Orange IoT solution was developed in response to De Beers' 'zero harm' objectives. It followed an initial engagement and joint exploratory workshop with the Orange Business Services team in South Africa and focused on IoT technologies, such as Bluetooth Low Energy locators and wearable sensors, as a precision crew locator tool, integrated with onboard antennas and an Orange software engine.

In the pilot, Orange Business Services imported the Mafuta's AutoCAD files and undertook an onboard site survey to map antenna locations to geofence a predetermined area on the vessel. Ten crew members were equipped with wrist sensors. If one of the crew breached the geofenced area onboard the vessel, the ship's bridge was alerted immediately.

De Beers Group Technology SA, an R&D arm of De Beers Group, is now further exploring additional applications, such as a breach alert function to link the sensors directly to the mining machinery via a SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) control system and PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers), to facilitate a failsafe cut-off in the event of a breach in the geofence.

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Orange Business Services