Data science keeps world’s biggest trucks rolling

Construction

Canada

Teck Resources, one of Canada’s largest diversified energy and mining companies, needed to optimize the efficiency of its mining haul trucks. These trucks must keep moving day and night because operating them represents 40% of mining site costs, and each minute of productive operation generates revenue. 

A modern mining haul truck is a million-pound IoT device on wheels producing 2GB of raw data per day and this presents a major opportunity to use AI for optimizing performance. 

The company needed to harness the power of the sensor data to predict costly issues—such as electrical failures and suspension degradation—before they happened. This would involve analyzing terabytes of raw operational sensor and alerts data, coupled with maintenance, scheduling, and other truck lifecycle records to produce actionable insights. 

Teck partnered with Pythian because of their proven expertise in data science and deep knowledge and experience implementing innovative solutions on Google Cloud.

Teck now has a machine learning application built on Google Cloud with integrated IoT data ingestion and predictive microservices embedded into its on-premises products.