Cement Plants in India, the Middle East and other countries have a large production and construction demand. The process involves packaging and shipping of cement in plastic or paper bags, and dispatch to warehouses, depots and customer sites. This requires efficient and reliable logistics handling of loading, counting, weighing and dispatching of cement bags.
The Challenge
To achieve these mammoth numbers in a smooth and reliable manner, the plant personnel must be assisted by intelligent systems to reduce missed counts, rejects, fraud and minimize losses.
While plants have tried and tested the IR sensor based, Load cell enabled & Manual operator driven methods, the accuracy levels have been less than 95%.
Elimination of manual or inaccurate semi-automatic process of loading, counting and dispatching of bags was the key driver that was to be addressed.
iLens– Industry 4.0– Vision Analytics Solution Overview
● The iLens– Industry 4.0– Vision Analytics- Cement Bag Detection & Counting solution offered 100% accurate & reliable implementation success for our client. The absolute power of the AI Powered solution to accurately detect and count cement bags, even in abnormal cases of conjoined bags, is its unique premise.
● The unique combination of Intel’s powerful hardware and the iLens solution’s inbuilt AI algorithms helped us build a robust solution for our customer. The AI algorithms factored the bags’ attributes, the type and speed of the conveyor belt, truck / wagon loading machinery installed on the plant’s multiple line bays to count every bag loaded.
Firstly, we planned to optimize the cost through efficient use of hardware and our approach to scalability issues. We collaborated with the Intel AI Builders technical team and developed an Intel compatible AI model architecture and leveraged the Intel Open VINO toolkit to optimize the resource hungry models. The Optimizations from this innovation has helped to improve the inference performance on Intel® Xeon® Cascade Lake by leveraging the quantization capabilities available via DL Boost on 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors.
We were able to run a large number of models parallelly in the same machine, which meant our architecture is compatible to run up to 30 cameras. This helped us to optimize cost and run more AI models with less number of servers.
● AI powered Vision Analytics enabled Cameras mounted across the conveyor belt of multiple line bays where cement bags are dispatched.
● Proactive Alerts, Intelligent Dash boarding on displays and reporting with live insights.
● Live video feed streamed to the iLens – Industry 4.0 solution prebuilt with AI/ Machine Learning models to perform accurate detection and reliable counting of the bags.
● Reports are further published on a daily/ consignment basis to the designated floor in charge.
● The solution provides an additional option to integrate with the customer’s ERP to automatically exchange information about the number of bags associated with the loading/ purchase order.
Business Benefits:
● Highest satisfactory score by our client’s customers with regard to accurate & timely delivery of cement bag purchase order.
● 35-40% reduction in turnaround time of loading, counting and dispatch processes.
● Rs 1.8 crore cost savings in loading operations which could be reinvested to raw materials procurement.
● Core usage of AI models retained, without loss of accuracy. Reduced process or space consumption by 20-30% with the ability to run up to 30 parallel streams on a single machine.
● Cost reduction by 50-60% on hardware used. Core usage of AI models retained, without loss of accuracy.
Knowledge Lens’ Industry 4.0 grade AI Vision Analytics solution ensures tamper-proof transport & dispatch of cement bags. They are a proven industry leader with 100% accuracy and customer satisfaction ratings. Their solution is flexible to be deployed locally or on the cloud, with a pricing structure that is dynamic and reasonable. The modular solution components allow for rapid scaling up or adaptation to future business requirements.
Knowledge Lens conducted the study on one of India’s leading cement manufacturers in the League of Fortune 500 who are renowned for their production of white cement in India. Their product portfolio consists of white cement-based surface finishing products.
Knowledge Lens is a B2B product company that builds innovative solutions on niche technology areas such as Big Data Analytics, Data Science, AI, IoT, AR, and Blockchain.