Fleet Management: A GPS-GIS integrated approach

S.S.S. Prakash, Madhav N. Kulkarni
Department of Civil Engineering, IIT Bombay, Mumbai - 400076
Tel: 91-022-25767308
Fax: 91-022-25767302 , E-Mail: sssprakash@iitb.ac.in, kulkarni@civil.iitb.ac.in


Abstract
Global Positioning System (GPS) is a satellite system that provides highly accurate location with the use of special GPS receivers and their augmentations. This accurate GPS data is of limited use by itself, unless it is coupled with a powerful visualization tool like the Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The GIS is a widely accepted visualization tool that presents data in a graphic form, which is a convenient and effective means of communicating complex information. These systems also have loads of relevant spatial and non-spatial data existing as different layers of information that can be expressed as a map. Thus, the integration of GPS and GIS brings into existence a powerful tool that has location and visualization aspects that can be put to effective use in all its applications. Fleet management deals with remote vehicle tracking and monitoring for effective utilization of resources and for building an information interface through which the consumers as well as the fleet owners can keep track of goods and vehicles. GPS-GIS integrated systems provide real-time meaningful location and status of the vehicles in the fleet, which can be used to plan trips, attend to real-time demands from consumers and monitor the traffic condition and driver behavior. These systems are an integral part of all modern fleet management systems and play a vital role in providing data for logistic planning and optimization in today’s increasingly competitive scenario. This paper deals with the use of GPS-GIS systems for fleet assessment and management for commercial, public and utility fleets. It is proposed to integrate the available GPS-GIS systems to form a prototype of a system that will show the instantaneous positions and direction of motion of the environment-friendly internal vehicles (the battery driven Vikram vehicles) plying in the IIT Bombay campus. For this purpose, a pilot test was conducted inside the IIT Bombay campus to check for GPS satellite signal availability, which gets hampered due to the heavy canopy. The test gave satisfactory results of horizontal and positional accuracy for vehicle positioning purposes.