Smart monitoring of fuel tanks and cross-checks with purchases and sales at service stations

A service station operator implemented a remote fuel inventory monitoring solution using the Reveal platform and a Phantom Shield L1 gateway connected to the tank gauge console it already had installed. The solution publishes each tank's volume, fuel height, water, available capacity, temperature, and density to Reveal, making them easy to view, alert on, and query historically. The dashboard also reconciles each fuel delivery against the tanker delivery note, and the solution includes cross-checking inventory against POS sales to identify differences and unjustified losses.

The same device is ready to add energy metering and lets the model be replicated at other stations in the network.

The station read its tank levels only on the console in the control room. The data was used for on-site checks, was not centralized, and variables such as fuel temperature were not taken into account.

As a result, detecting water in a tank, a minimum level, or a poorly planned delivery depended on someone checking the console, and it was hard to reconcile gallons purchased with gallons received.

In addition, there was no real-time correlation between what is measured in the tanks, what is purchased, and what is sold at the POS, and analysis ran at defined intervals rather than continuously, which delayed the detection of differences, incomplete deliveries, or possible leaks.

The challenge was to have a reliable, timely inventory of all tanks, cross-check it with purchases and sales, spot anomalies quickly, and have history available to plan deliveries, without replacing the existing console.

The solution combines hardware and SaaS-type software. A Phantom Shield L1 gateway reads the tank gauge console over a serial link, converts the data, and sends it over a cellular connection every 10 minutes to the Reveal platform, where it is visualized and analyzed.

The solution includes:

Fuel inventory: readings from 4 tanks (2 regular gasoline, 1 extra gasoline, and 1 diesel) with 9 variables per tank: volume, temperature-compensated net volume, fuel height, water height and volume, available capacity at 100% and 90%, temperature, and density.

Resilient operation: if the Internet connection fails, the gateway stores events and resends them once it recovers. It has a hardware clock to keep the time, watchdogs for the connection and its services, and monitoring of its own health: CPU, memory, temperature, and disk.

Reveal platform: a centralized platform with a rules engine, alerts, and events, plus dashboards for viewing information in real time and historically.

Fuel dashboard: a dedicated dashboard with delivery forecasting and daily consumption. It was tested with one month of simulated data.

Purchase reconciliation: the dashboard detects each delivery as an increase in tank volume and compares it with the gallons on the tanker delivery note, with a tolerance of ±0.5%. Each delivery ends up in one of three states: reconciled, with a moderate difference (possible thermal expansion or tanker calibration), or with a significant discrepancy, which raises a reconciliation alert that the team marks as attended. The reconciliation log can be exported to CSV.

POS cross-check: the solution includes comparing measured fuel against fuel sold, using the station's POS sales. The logic is a balance per tank and per product: expected inventory is the opening inventory plus purchases minus sales, and the difference from the measured inventory points to possible leaks, shrinkage, or recording errors.

In the readings of the last seven days, the water in the diesel tank stays around 1.55 inches. This is the kind of condition an alert rule turns into a notification. The next stage is to activate the station's alert rules: water above 1 inch, minimum and maximum levels, and abnormal volume drops.