EUROPEAN STEEL TECHNOLOGY AND APPLICATION DAYS 2017 - ESTAD 2017

Indoor positioning of steel ladles using beacons ------------------------------------------------ ---------- In recent years significant progress has been achieved in the field of Bluetooth technology. While the Bluetooth functionality is well-known since the 1990s, it was recently that new application scenarios have occurred originating from the energy saving Bluetooth version BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy, Bluetooth Smart). Since GPS does not work indoors, the Bluetooth beacon is a good alternative for indoor positioning in a steel plant. The beacon is cheap, runs on button cells up to years and has a maximum indoor range of 70 - 100 m. On the one hand, the beacon can be used in client based solutions, that is to say positioning via a mobile application (App). On the other hand, a server based positioning solution is possible as well. For ladle positioning, 2 - 4 beacons have been mounted onto the ladle steel shells in a steel plant. The beacons transmit unique signals by which the mobile application determines the current ladle position. In case of the client based solution the application is running onto the smart device itself. In case of the cloud based solution the Application is run onto a Federation server. The paper describes the basic layout, results and benefits of the beacon solution in the steel plant.