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Fleet Management: A GPS-GIS integrated approach
Types of fleets and associated problems
(1) Public transport and Utility fleets: Public transport includes bus services, trains, trams and private fleets of hotels, airlines and educational institutions. Utility fleets cover fire brigades, police vehicles, ambulances and other fleets that are on standby in case of emergency or disasters. It is extremely necessary for fleet operators to track their vehicles in unforeseen cases of accidents, thefts or hijackings. For any public transport organization, scheduling and planning of routes and ensuring that the vehicles run as per schedule is vital. Failure in management of fleets that make large number of repetitive trips in larger cities cause the system to become unpopular among the masses and results in a shift in traffic towards personal modes of transport. In conventional systems, tracking used to be done by posting traffic controllers and time-keepers along the route. This does not provide complete coverage and also is error-prone due to human dependability. The paperwork too is very cumbersome to handle and analyze. A good example of implementation of GPS-GIS systems in India is the case of the Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC), which installed indigenous GPS units on all buses of a depot. The readings were downloaded every three days and reports were drafted with emphasis on missed trips, short trips and punctuality problems (Kharola et al., 2002).
GPS-GIS integrated systems provide the operators with location, speed, distance traveled in a certain time and time taken to complete trips, which can be used for automatic billing to make payments in case of hired private vehicles and for assessment of performance of the fleet to ensure public comfort. In case of utility fleets, when a customer calls the control center for service, the operator can easily see the availability of the vehicles near the customer's area on a map. The individual drivers have different colour codes showing their status of job which is used by the operator to assign the new job immediately through an electronic message via the Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) network without the need of waiting for the driver to establish verbal contact. The GPS-GIS system also monitors idling vehicles and precise destination locations for devising shortest paths for total coverage.
(2) Commercial Fleets: The freight transportation industry is facing severe competition with a large number of organizations venturing into the lucrative goods transport and logistics sector with increasing economic growth. Businesses are flourishing and the supply of raw materials to the manufacturing plants and the finished goods to the consumers in limited time with minimum requirement of storage at warehouses is becoming a vital challenge. Fleet owners must have real-time information about the location and status of all their vehicles for dynamic scheduling and planning of trips that originate as a result of dynamic consumer requests.
Logistics and supply chains
Requests from customers of commercial fleets arrive randomly over time and require service within a short interval of time. Since, it may take upto several days to move transportation equipment over long distances, it is not advisable to wait until a customer request is known before starting to move the equipment. Among the randomness of transit times and equipment failures, it is necessary to wisely move equipment to serve demands before they are known (Powell and Topaloglu, 2002).
Truckload motor carriers in specific have to take care of carrier requests and place dynamic orders for delivery and pick-up. The equipment and cargo to be carried must be decided and the protocol planned. If a cargo needs to be taken through a long distance, it may go thorough the hands of several drivers and may have to take breaks at warehouses on its journey to the destination. After a driver completes his segment of the trip, it is the fleet manager's duty to get him another task that will carry him back home or ask him to wait till a demand is created in that area. These complex components of commercial fleet management - supply and demand management and logistics (strategic movement, storage of materials, parts and finished goods on supply chains through stages of procurement, work-in progress and final distribution) require real-time visual positioning of all vehicles that can be very effectively done by a GPS-GIS system. The fleet operator can use data from such systems for optimizing his operations by visual monitoring and dynamic routing of his fleet.
Disaster relief and recovery operations
One of the most important applications of fleet management is in immediate dispatch of relief to disaster-struck areas. GPS-GIS systems can be used to plan evacuation routes and to design centers for emergency operations. During the relief process, these systems help rescue operations in areas where the communication networks have been destroyed. A case worth discussing is the erratic traffic condition immediately following a landslide or an earthquake. The Laboratory of Geodesy at the School of Engineering of the Aristotle University, Thessaloniki at Greece has developed a system of fleet management working with real-time DGPS. The objective after an earthquake is to make an assessment of traffic conditions for easy and quick movement of relief vehicles to the site of disaster. The constraints are loss of earlier uniform accepted data of normal traffic conditions on various routes, which go invalid after disruptions due to the earthquake or landslide. The system developed at the Aristotle University assumed utility vehicles like fire engines, ambulances and other emergency vehicles to be at different locations in the area and by monitoring their real-time positions after the disaster, a real-time database of the current traffic conditions is built and is used to guide relief vehicles through the least congested routes providing shorter access times using the GIS database (Savvaidis et al., 2000).
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