Intangles is a Digital Twin company that provides real-time insights to fleet operators and managers about the performance of vehicles and provides precise and timely suggestions to make informed decisions.
The company has been providing data-driven insights on vehicle health, driver behaviour profiling, operations intelligence, fuel management and AdBlue tracking to fleet operators and commercial vehicle OEMs using physics-driven machine learning workflows.
Intangles began its operations in 2016 with its digital twin concept and a young workforce from Pune. In an interaction with Bus Coach India Magazine, Neil Unadkat, CTO and Co-founder of Intangles, highlighted the current market situation and the company’s future plans to revolutionise the Indian automotive market, especially in the bus segment.
Digital Twin Technology
Digital Twin, which is based on the Internet of Things (IoT), allows you to create a virtual replica of a physical asset. Intangles leverages digital twin technology to simulate the behaviour of components and systems in the virtual space, in the process churning mission-critical insights on performance, and wear and tear.
Digital twin technology plays a critical role in fleet maintenance. The digital twins of drivetrain components are being used to generate predictive insights for use cases like overheating, battery charging, and fuel-air charge composition. This is made possible by minimal user interaction while providing comprehensive insights on fuel efficiency-pilferage, driving performance, route plans, and emissions control system performance.
By monitoring components in real-time, digital twins help you know exactly when a potential failure will happen, before it happens – helping reduce downtime across your whole operation. And by using AI systems to predict future failures based on historical data patterns, companies can also optimise their daily operations. This will reduce the number of unnecessary road trips and prioritise urgent repairs.
On-Road Vehicle Breakdown Alerts
Historic and real-time data helps deliver alerts of possible failures, leading to a significant reduction in the on-road breakdown of vehicles, thereby increasing operational hours and lowering maintenance and repair costs. Averting an imminent breakdown saves unplanned costs towards towing, making alternate arrangements for goods or passengers, and post-failure repairs and replacements, which may prove costly.
“With Intangles, fleet operators have the necessary information related to fault codes that may arise in their vehicles, whether minor, major or critical ones, at their fingertips and you can look at remedies depending on the severity. Along with faults, our proprietary predictive algorithms coupled with machine learning will help fleet operators conduct preventive and proactive maintenance, making sure your vehicles stay healthy,” said Neil.
With Intangles’ solutions deployed, there has been a reported 75 per cent reduction in breakdown events, up to 30 per cent improvement in driver behaviour, up to 30 per cent increase in asset availability, up to 10 per cent reduction in maintenance costs via predictive approach, and an impressive 96 per cent predictive AI accuracy driven through precision analytics.
When Intangles first partnered with a large bus fleet operator, their platform proved its efficacy by accurately identifying the factors that could cause a vehicle to break down. The fleet operator was able to bring down instances of breakdown by 75%. “We began to learn about the most common faults that fleet operators encounter, such as overheating, alternator failure, untimely discharge of a battery, and poor performance of the fuel and air metering system. Then, we began to map those concerns in our diagnostic data streams.”
“After speaking with fleet operators, we recognised that a vehicle has specific components prone to failure, and we need to provide component level analytics. We ended up getting into this whole Digital Twin ecosystem by accident when we realised we were using physics-based analytics and integrating it into our Machine Learning platform in the form of hybrid analytics. After doing some more research, we discovered that such technologies are commonly perceived as digital twins. So, we began our adventure long before we were even aware that the concept of Digital Twins existed,” he added.
Expansion plans
Intangles has established its presence in nine other countries, including Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Kuwait, the UAE and Belgium.
“We have partnered with some very large companies. We have partnered with an oil and gas major to penetrate large fleets in these developed markets. That’s the kind of expansion plan that we have charted out over a period of the next two to three years. We have been growing at 250% year-over-year and hope to be in the same range in terms of revenue growth.
“We are expanding to foreign shores by expanding operations in North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. In the next three to four months, with the kind of partnerships that we have established, we will be deploying our solutions in Turkey, Vietnam and other countries in the APAC. Fleet operators, whether they are operating in North America or Europe, are ready to get this level of insight because they know the cost of breakdown far outweighs the cost of predictive analytics as a service,” Neil elaborated.
Saving Opportunity for Fleet Operators
When the go-to-market was consolidated, a clear-cut framework was established for preventing vehicle breakdowns and accrual of cost benefits to the fleet operator. “We are talking about improvement in the overall performance of the vehicle and increasing the life of the asset by reducing its downtime. Therefore, we were able to show customers the significant value they would derive out of the system,” the CTO explained.
Customers in the heavy commercial vehicles segment have witnessed savings of Rs 2-3 lakh per month after being on-boarded onto the Intangles platform. “This is because we quantify the reasons for poor performance related to low mileage or bad driving behaviour. Within 30-45 days of installation, a customer is able to achieve returns on investment,” he added.
In the initial stages of marketing, the fleet manager’s feedback on component level profiling was addressed, there were certain conventional aspects of driving behaviour which needed attention. That certainly was a daunting challenge. “For our key customers, we offer a comprehensive driver training programme. The idea is to educate the drivers of practices that will suit the modern vehicles and lead to improved efficiency of the vehicle,” Neil concluded.
New launches
The new “Inline Driving Scorecard” feature enables fleet operators to monitor and analyse erroneous driving practices like idling, harsh acceleration, free running, hard breaking and overspeeding. In its bid to promote fuel efficiency and appropriate driving behaviour, Intangles’ latest feature enables operators to promote and incentivise good driving behaviour using the scorecards. The feature is a one-stop destination to gather precise and apt insights into the efficiency of drivers. The platform displays scores based on various aspects of driving behaviour and is, therefore, a reliable tool that provides actionable insights. It provides accurate feedback on gear utilisation trends, idling instances and other erroneous driving practices, thereby improving fuel efficiency and overall health of the vehicle. Fleet operators have witnessed an impressive 12-15% improvement in mileage and fuel economy on utilising the feature.