The Class I railroad’s intermodal yard decided to purchase additional heavy equipment to help increase speed and efficiency of work. With the increase in equipment, management quickly realized their basic Wi-Fi solution was no longer robust enough to handle the dynamic nature of the railyard. In addition to the Wi-Fi, 2-way radios were still being used to determine vehicle and personnel locations. This mix of basic systems would not work if the railyard was going to implement a stack management application to track contents of the container stack and manage cranes, vehicles, containers and devices. As such a different type of network was required that did not take up any additional space that was going to be allocated to the new heavy equipment coming in.
One of the specific requirements of the new stack management application is that there needs to be high network availability, so that sent UDP packet streams are always received. If any of these packets are missed the system will not record the location of a container, and disrupt the entire process. With a Rajant Kinetic Mesh system in place there is no static infrastructure; each radio, or node, serves as singular infrastructure, which enables all devices and the network itself to be mobile. This means that there’s no single point of failure and data packets can be routed automatically and evaluations can be made on the quality and performance of route the data gets sent on. This allows the network to adapt to node location, local interference and congestion dynamically, eliminating downtime even in the most rugged conditions such as on a railyard. The network can also be redeployed in multiple ways by simply repositioning nodes.
