A perspective on systems and controls engineering in the earth moving and construction industry

This paper focuses on the requirements of systems and controls engineering for production intent machines in the earth moving and construction industry. Mobile machinery operates in an ill-structured environment which subsequently makes it difficult to define requirements in complete engineering terms. This in turn makes it difficult to judge the feasibility of introducing a control or system onto a production machine. To address this problem, several top level metrics are introduced to evaluate performance. These include measuring the machine efficiency by the cost per ton of materials moved or quantity of materials moved per gallon of fuel, and machine utilization as the percentage of total shift time. These metrics are then used to gain a perspective of current controls development for mobile machinery and its feasibility in production.