The Civil Engineering Contractor April 2019 | Page 6

POLICYMAKERS
Highway construction worker and heavy equipment.
PDS for construction sites?
Legislation has been promulgated by the Department of Mineral Resources (DMR), requiring
all mines to take steps before 2020 to physically prevent contact between mobile machines
and humans, or to install proximity detection systems (PDS) on trackless mobile machinery
(TMM) for effective collision management.
By the time this system has been fully implemented —
no later than December 2020 — it is likely that similar
legislation will be introduced for the construction industry,
and others such as forestry and farming. “We have heard that
by the time this system is implemented in mines, it will also
be applied to other industries such as construction, forestry,
farming, and more,” says Anton Lourens, managing director
of Booyco Electronics.
There are a number of parties involved in the process,
including PDS suppliers and the OEMs who preferred to
have the ‘handshake’ system integrated into their vehicle at
manufacture, rather than the post-manufacture addition of a
third-party system. End users are also involved. This process
4 | CEC April 2019
is continuous, with the many OEMs and third-party suppliers
all at various stages of completion, with certain OEMs
attempting to accelerate the process by providing machines to
PDS suppliers. There is an increase in the number of lab scale
tests conducted by the University of Pretoria (UP). Aspasa’s
director, Nico Pienaar, notes that the UP tests have acted
as a game changer in the PDS industry with a well-defined
evaluation process. “So far, all the PDS suppliers which have
been evaluated have not met expectations and are modifying
their solutions with the objective of retesting.
“We have frequent meetings with OEMs such as Bell,
Komatsu, and others who must build it into their machine.
The system is an extension of systems that many newer
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