The road audit tool semi-automates the auditing process, bringing a task that may take more than 40 hours for 20 kilometres of roadway to less than 30 minutes.

"Conducting road audits is usually a manual and time-consuming process. It is also difficult to maintain in an environment where roads and safety bund requirements are changing, and labour is expensive," the company said.

"The tool measures road and bund physicals, compares them to site requirements, and highlights non-compliant areas in a single process."

It also allows for audits to be done more often, as the conventional method results in a high-cost project that is thus completed rarely. It also can potentially disconnect a site and those tasked with the job from the operating environment.

Deswik noted that the automated outputs of their process include new refined road centrelines, road sections, polygons of noncompliance area for plotting and reporting, as well as bund noncompliance areas and more.

"By completing the process using the integrated Deswik solutions, productivity analysis can be run on the outputs to determine the potential production uplift gained by modifying the roads. Detailed designs can also be created and sent directly to machine guidance systems for rectification works."

The Deswik road audit tool has already been in use at a BHP operation. "I had never used the tool before, but in less than 30 minutes I was able to create the required inputs to audit all of the primary haul routes for a large open cut coal site in the Bowen Basin," Deswik cited BHP mining engineer Alex Rowell as saying.

"All that is needed is rough centrelines for the haul routes to be audited and the design parameters. I was able to run checks on-ramp gradients, cross gradients, road widths and bund heights against the design parameters."

The Deswik road audit tool is part of the Deswik.AdvSurvey module.