Customer success: Heguang Cloud helps Lakes District Maintenance achieve accurate salt-pile volumetry
Efficient, accurate, low-cost salt-pile volume and tonnage solutions for salt operators through intelligence and automation
Summary
In North America, public agencies stock de-icing rock salt in spring and summer for winter road safety. Holding too much increases operating cost, while aging piles can clump and damage spreaders. Lakes District Maintenance previously relied on visual estimates of dome inventories—slow and error-prone. HEGANG YUNCHANG provides a LiDAR and point-cloud fusion program for accurate, automated salt-pile monitoring, helping the customer optimize inventory and day-to-day operations.
Customer background
Lakes District Maintenance runs winter de-icing for a North American region and must track many dome inventories. Legacy methods suffered from:
- Large visual-estimate error—hard to know true pile volume;
- Heavy patrol load—engineers shuttled between domes;
- Imprecise storage control—no live height, risking waste or spreader damage.
HEGANG YUNCHANG solution
For these pain points, HEGANG YUNCHANG delivered a LiDAR + image fusion measurement stack for efficient, accurate salt-pile monitoring.
Program highlights
1. Adaptive scanning
- Terrain-aware modes for dome, open pile, or trapezoid sheds—about 2,000 m² modeled in five minutes;
2. Obstacle-aware volume
- AI removes loaders and transient gear—pure salt volume error about ≤2.3%;
3. Live fusion and mapping
- Edge nodes fuse cloud + RGB on a ~10-minute cadence into textured 3D domes;
- GIS heatmaps by dome tonnage and haul distance to tune winter spreader routes.
Implementation outcomes
HEGANG YUNCHANG salt volumetry helped Lakes District Maintenance tighten inventory and operations:
- Reserve accuracy: error from ~35% to about 2.5%; winter shortage incidents to zero;
- Labor: ~82% less dome patrol effort; faster response in storms;
- Cost: major annual salt loss reduction and ~68% lower spreader repair cost.
Customer feedback
- 📌 "This winter I finally stopped driving dome-to-dome every day." — Michael, engineer, Lakes District Maintenance
Core value tags: #intelligentmeasurement #automatedpatrol #costoptimization #inventorycontrol