Excavator Index indicates vitality in infrastructure

CHANGSHA — Excavator operator Xu Zhengtao worked through Spring Festival without pause at a commercial real estate construction project in Central China's Hubei province.

This is the 15th project Xu has worked on over the past year. "The more my excavator works, the more money I can make," he said, without realizing that the operating rate and workload of each excavator are aggregated into the "excavator index" that serves as an indicator of China's infrastructure development.

Based on the industrial internet of things (IIoT) platform Rootcloud, an industrial internet service provider, the index tracks the operating rate of hundreds of thousands of pieces of construction machinery across the country.