Gateway Replacement on Feed Tanker Trailers: Traceability on Open Linux

The client is a European manufacturer of bulk tanker semi-trailers for livestock feed. The trailers carry pelleted and dry bulk feed to farms and discharge it with screw conveyors. The manufacturer builds the tankers; its customers operate them.

Feed is the first link in the meat and dairy chain, and a tanker that moves from farm to farm carries more than its load. Every delivery raises the same questions. When and where was the tank unloaded? Was it cleaned before the next load went in? Were the tires disinfected before the truck drove onto the next farm?

A driver's paper log can answer those questions. It cannot prove the answers.

The tankers previously carried an off-the-shelf tracker. A tracker reports position well, and anything beyond position is bounded by the inputs and functions its vendor chose to build in. For a manufacturer that wants its trailers to document a process, that is the wrong place to draw the line.

Our engineering reasoning was about where the logic should live. An Owasys open Linux gateway runs software that we write and the manufacturer owns. Three things follow from that:

• Custom logic on the device. The gateway can turn raw inputs into events (an unloading, a cleaning, a disinfection cycle) at the edge, instead of streaming signals for someone else to interpret later.
• The manufacturer's own data model. Records are defined in the manufacturer's terms, not squeezed into a tracker's generic I/O fields.
• Room to grow without vendor lock-in. Extending what the trailer records is a change to software the manufacturer already owns, not a request on a tracker vendor's roadmap.

The replacement gateway handles four data streams on each trailer:

• Unloading and cleaning traceability: a record of each unloading and each cleaning of the tank.
• Position and route: GPS position and route tracking, sent over the mobile network.
• Tire disinfection cycles: each disinfection cycle is logged, as biosecurity evidence.
• Screw conveyor health: motor speed and pressure on the screw conveyor, the input for predictive maintenance.

Each stream is useful on its own. Captured on one device, they become a single history of what the trailer did, where it did it, and in what order.

Traceability. The unloading and cleaning record shows when and where each discharge took place and whether a cleaning came between two loads. That is the evidence a feed safety question needs, without relying on memory or paperwork.

Biosecurity. Route and disinfection data belong together. The route shows which farms the trailer visited; the disinfection log shows that the tires were treated along the way. Disease travels between farms on vehicles, so this pairing matters to the operator and to the farms it serves.

Early warning on conveyor wear. A drift in screw conveyor motor speed or pressure can point to wear before it turns into a breakdown in a farmyard. The operator gets a reason to schedule service. The manufacturer gets field data on how its equipment behaves in daily use.

For the manufacturer, the result is a trailer whose telematics are part of the product, built on its own data model rather than on the feature list of a third-party tracker.

Many machine and vehicle builders start with a tracker because position is the first thing customers ask for. The pattern in this project applies once the questions go beyond position: proving that a process step happened, recording equipment health, documenting hygiene or compliance steps in the field.

At that point a gateway replacement moves the logic onto hardware the OEM controls, and the software becomes an asset the OEM owns. Melqart Systems is an engineering company based in Luxembourg working with Owasys open Linux gateways. We deliver the device software and the integration with the machine's signals, and the customer owns the result.