Site station and tanker automation for a mixed fleet

The operation runs a mixed fleet of 125 vehicles: 20 machines, 55 trucks, 12 tractor units and 38 cars. The whole fleet is fuelled from a single site station and one fuel tanker, consuming ~12,000 liters a day — roughly 4.4 million liters a year.

Despite that volume, fuel processes were run entirely by hand: fills were logged on paper slips, and when the tanker refuelled machines out in the field there was no reliable record of which machine received how much.

Because the fleet spans four different classes, consumption could not be compared either. Liters-per-hour for machines and liters-per-100 km for trucks and tractor units never appeared in the same view, so abnormal consumption and losses went unnoticed.

Three components were installed: site station automation, tanker automation and a central management system. The station tank was placed under level monitoring and the pump was automated with a control unit; the tanker used for field refuelling was brought into the same structure. Both supply points now feed a single record stream.

Every vehicle in the fleet was fitted with an RFID key fob, and drivers were enrolled on a biometric reader and paired with their vehicles. Each fill now shows which vehicle, which driver and how much — in a single record. Unregistered vehicles and unauthorized users cannot draw fuel.

The RFID reader also captures the vehicle odometer at every fill. Because distance and volume arrive together, liters/100 km for trucks and tractor units and liters/hour for machines are calculated automatically; the per-vehicle consumption average became the site's real benchmark. In the central system, the drop in tank level is continuously reconciled with total fills.