Industry Solutions

Industrial Maintenance & Utilities
RTLS & Safety Solutions

Real-time worker safety and asset visibility for critical industrial and utility sites.

Maintenance and utility operations run in hazardous, high‑value environments such as power plants, chemical facilities and large industrial complexes. GridRTLS combines UWB indoor positioning with GPS outdoors to provide live visibility of workers, vehicles and tools, improving safety, maintenance execution and regulatory compliance.

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Industrial Maintenance & Utilities

Industrial maintenance and utility operations support vital infrastructure — electricity generation and distribution, oil and gas processing, chemical plants, steel mills and water treatment facilities. These sites feature dense pipe racks, high‑voltage areas, confined spaces, rotating machinery and heavy mobile equipment. Work often happens during shutdowns, turnarounds or emergency repairs, involving many contractors on tight schedules.

Traditional controls such as work permits, radios and paper sign‑in sheets provide only partial oversight. Supervisors may not know exactly who is working in which zone, which contractor teams are inside confined spaces, or how close workers are to moving cranes, trucks or overhead cranes. When an incident occurs, reconstructing who was nearby and how events unfolded is time‑consuming and incomplete.

GridRTLS deploys rugged UWB anchors and wireless beacons in process units, tunnels, buildings and outdoor pipe racks, with wearable tags for personnel and vehicle‑mounted devices for cranes, trucks and forklifts. The system typically delivers better than 30 cm indoor accuracy with update rates from 1–10 Hz in open conditions, even in harsh industrial RF environments

GPS and RTK devices extend coverage outdoors across tank farms, stockyards and open pits.

The platform enables real‑time maps of workers and vehicles, geofences around hazardous zones, man‑down and SOS alarms, collision‑avoidance logic and detailed exposure reports by zone, job, contractor and time. Integration with permit‑to‑work, DCS / SCADA, video and access control systems turns location data into a central safety and operations layer.

📊 Key stats for this industry

Typical Site Coverage: 10,000–500,000 m²
Concurrent Workforce Tracked: 100–3,000 personnel
Mobile Assets & Vehicles Tracked: 50–500 assets
Typical Indoor Accuracy: <30 cm

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Operational challenges

Managing worker safety in hazardous zones

Industrial and utility sites contain high‑risk areas such as high‑voltage rooms, rotating machinery, hot surfaces and confined spaces. Supervisors need continuous awareness of who is in each zone and whether they are authorised and protected.

Person–vehicle and vehicle–vehicle collision risks

Forklifts, cranes, dump trucks and other machines operate in tight spaces with limited visibility. Without accurate proximity detection, near‑misses and collisions are hard to prevent and analyse.

Limited insight into contractor activities and exposure

During turnarounds and shutdowns, hundreds of contractors enter the plant. Paper permits and manual checks do not provide real‑time visibility of where contractor teams are working or how long they stay in hazardous zones.

Locating tools, lifting gear and temporary equipment

Specialised tools, scaffolding components, lifting accessories and temporary equipment move between jobs and areas. Misplaced items cause delays, extra rentals and disputes.

Slow and incomplete incident investigation

After an incident, HSE teams must reconstruct worker movements, presence in exposure zones and equipment positions. Without reliable location history, investigations rely on interviews and partial logs.

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Business drivers

Reduce incidents and improve HSE performance

Real-time location, geofencing and collision‑avoidance alerts help prevent accidents in high‑risk industrial environments and support corporate HSE targets.

Increase productivity during maintenance and shutdowns

Better visibility of worker deployment, equipment locations and zone occupancy speeds up work execution, reduces waiting time and improves coordination between teams.

Strengthen compliance and audit readiness

Accurate records of who entered each zone, for how long and under which permit help satisfy regulators, insurers and internal audit requirements.

Optimise asset fleets and reduce rental costs

Usage and location data for cranes, vehicles and tools supports right‑sizing fleet capacity and reducing unused or lost equipment.

📜 Regulations & safety expectations

Industrial maintenance and utility operations are usually governed by strict safety regulations and standards covering confined spaces, electrical safety, hazardous areas, work permits and contractor management. RTLS does not replace these controls but enhances them by providing real‑time and historical evidence for audits, incident investigations and performance reviews.

Deployments in explosive or hazardous environments may require intrinsically safe devices and certified equipment. GridRTLS hardware options include rugged, IP66–IP67‑rated anchors and tags designed for harsh industrial and explosive atmospheres, supporting continuous operation at temperatures from about –40 °C to +80 °C.

Final system design should be reviewed with site safety, electrical and instrumentation teams to ensure compliance with local regulations and company standards.

🧩 Typical RTLS use cases

Common positioning and tracking scenarios for this industry.

Worker Safety & Contractor Oversight in Process Units

Workers and contractors wear RTLS tags when entering process units or hazardous areas. Supervisors can see real‑time headcount by unit and zone, receive alerts if unauthorised personnel enter restricted areas, and use historical traces to support permit‑to‑work compliance and incident analysis.

Environment: mixed
Accuracy: 0.3–1 m in production units, pipe racks and buildings.
Update rate: 1–3 s for safety‑critical visibility.
Tracked objects: personnel, visitors_contractors

Typical integrations: Permit‑to‑work systems, access control, DCS / SCADA event feeds, CCTV / VMS, HSE incident‑management platforms.

Vehicle & Mobile Equipment Collision Avoidance

UWB devices on forklifts, cranes and other mobile equipment continuously measure distance to wearable tags and other vehicles. When separation falls below a configured threshold, the system issues audio/visual warnings and logs events for analysis.

Environment: mixed
Accuracy: <30 cm for short‑range proximity; 1–3 m for general vehicle tracking.
Update rate: 0.5–1 s for proximity detection and alarms
Tracked objects: personnel, vehicles, mobile_equipment

Typical integrations: Vehicle control systems, fleet‑management platforms, CCTV, safety dashboards

Tool, Lifting Gear & Temporary Asset Tracking

Tags are attached to specialised tools, lifting accessories, scaffolding components and temporary equipment. Supervisors can search and locate items on a map, check where they were last used, and track utilisation during major shutdowns

Environment: mixed
Accuracy: 0.5–3 m depending on asset type and zone size.
Update rate: 10–60 s for assets, optimised for battery life
Tracked objects: mobile_equipment, tools_pallets, materials_inventory

Typical integrations: Tool‑room and asset‑management systems, CMMS / maintenance‑management, rental and logistics systems

Lone‑Worker Protection with Smart Helmets & Wearables

Maintenance technicians and inspectors working alone in remote areas, substations or at height wear smart helmets or badges with UWB + GPS, motion and SOS buttons. Man‑down, no‑movement or panic events trigger alarms with precise location and can automatically bring up camera views.

Environment: mixed
Accuracy: 0.3–1 m around equipment, platforms and access routes.
Update rate: 1–2 s while active; longer intervals in low‑risk transit zones.
Tracked objects: personnel

Typical integrations: Permit‑to‑work and job‑planning systems, security and emergency‑response platforms, CCTV / video linkage, voice communication systems.

📋 RTLS requirements for this industry

Typical coverage: Production units, pipe racks, tank farms, substations, switch rooms, workshops, warehouses, control buildings, tunnels and yards — ranging from 10,000 m² for a single facility to 500,000 m² or more for integrated plants or utility networks.
Personnel scale: Typical deployments cover 100–1,000 workers on a single site during normal operations, scaling to 2,000–3,000 people during shutdowns or turnarounds when contractor activity peaks.
Assets & vehicles: Dozens to hundreds of tracked vehicles and machines (cranes, forklifts, trucks, maintenance vehicles) and hundreds to thousands of tagged tools and temporary assets such as pumps, generators, scaffolding sets and lifting gear.
Environment constraints: Industrial and utility environments feature high temperatures, dust, humidity, vibration, electromagnetic noise and in some cases explosive atmospheres. RTLS anchors and tags must be rugged, with IP66–IP67 protection, wide temperature ranges (around –40 °C to +80 °C) and strong EMC performance. UWB’s wideband, short‑pulse signals provide high accuracy and strong resistance to interference from metal structures and other radios, while GPS / RTK receivers serve open outdoor areas and long‑range coverage.

🛡️ Safety & reliability expectations

Safety‑critical use cases (collision avoidance, man‑down alarms, hazardous‑zone monitoring) demand sub‑meter accuracy, location updates every 0.5–2 seconds and high system availability (target ≥99.99% during operating hours). UWB anchors and tags can achieve <30 cm accuracy in open conditions with configurable update rates up to 10 Hz, while RTK‑enabled GPS devices on vehicles and fixed structures provide centimetre‑level outdoor accuracy.

The system should support redundant servers and gateways, local buffering of data during network outages and continuous health monitoring. Battery‑powered beacons can operate for several years in 1 Hz modes, reducing maintenance effort in hard‑to‑access areas such as towers and pipe racks.

Clear governance around data retention, access rights and use of analytics is needed to align RTLS with internal HSE and IT security policies.

🛰️ RTLS solutions for this industry

📦 Devices and infrastructure used in this industry

SN2 UWB PoE Anchor

The SN2 is an industrial‑grade UWB positioning anchor designed for high‑accuracy real‑time location systems. It supports Standard PoE or 12–24 V DC power, delivers sub‑meter performance (<30 cm LoS), and features an IP66 enclosure for harsh indoor/outdoor environments. Multiple mounting options (ceiling, wall, pole clamp) make deployment easy in factories, warehouses, and tunnels. Optional 4G/Wi‑Fi backhaul, AI video add‑on, and sound‑light alarm extend the anchor’s capability for safety and analytics. (Actual performance depends on anchor density, layout, and site RF conditions.)