What are the IoT Applications in the Transportation Industry?
What are the IoT Applications in the Transportation Industry?
The internet of things (IoT) is a popular term these days that are used to interrelate computing devices, digital machines, and mechanical objects. IoT technology is used to transfer data over a network without any human interaction. A plenty of organizations are using IoT to improve their efficiency and to better understand their customers. This enables the company so they can deliver improved and enhanced customer services and accelerate the overall decision-making process too. But, what are the IoT applications in Transportation Industry?
In this article, we will discuss the IoT evolution and its working along with the benefits. Here, we will majorly focus on the IoT applications in the transportation industry and how they can reap benefits from the IoT.
IoT Evolution and how IoT is being used?
In 1999, Kevin Ashton firstly mentioned the concept of the internet of things in a presentation held in P&G. Convergence of wireless technology and micro-electro mechanical systems gave birth to the IoT systems. Machine to machine communication gave birth to IoT, where the machines were connected without human interaction. M2M was all about connecting devices to the cloud along with data collection and machine management processes.
IoT is a SCADA or supervisory control system and data acquisition program to control processes.
In these systems, data is gathered from the remote locations in the real-time. Hardware and software systems both are the part of SCADA systems. Hardware usually gathers data and feed into the system, on which software is installed.
A number of benefits are offered by IoT these days and that is why it is being used by various industries to accomplish their processes.
Here are listed a few of the benefits that are offered by the IoT. These include:
- The overall business process can be monitored.
- Customer experience can be improved.
- To save time and money.
- To enhance employee’s productivity.
- To adapt and integrate business model.
- To take better business decisions.
- To generate more revenues.
IoT has changed the way that technology is usually adopted. Even businesses can make their strategies in different ways and provide better services to their customers.
IoT Applications in Transportation
Before we check out the IoT apps in transportation, let us see how it works?
IoT ecosystem consists of smart devices that are linked to the web and use sensors, processors, and communication hardware, so that they can collect and send the data to them. Here, data is acquired from the environment. Sensor data is shared by the IoT devices which they collect via IoT gateways or other devices. Here the data source can also be a cloud where data has been sent for analysis. Here sometimes the devices communicate with other devices and collect the data from these devices to process it.
Here, all tasks like information transfer and data collection are being done without human intervention. Here people can interact with these devices either to provide the data or to give instructions or to access data from them.
Moving ahead, let us discuss the IoT benefits for transportation.
Transportation is the second largest industry for the investors of IoT. Among overall investment, a small portion of this goes to fleet management and monitoring. IoT has changed transportation or trucking industry rapidly. Here, the reason behind this is connectivity enhancement and mobile technology as well. Today gadgets are being used by everyone that makes the work more efficient and carry out many vital roles and important operations. IoT has made trucking and road safety system quite easier, even fleet management also has become quite organized and managed post involvement of IoT.
In every country, most of the freight management is being done by trucks and in the US truck transportation is a major part of the economy. Due to IoT involvement even autonomous trucks will also become reality. Here, we are going to explore and enlist major changes that are offered by IoT in the transportation industry.
1). Fleet Management.
Business owners always prefer to get the real-time information so that they can reap more business benefits by taking timely decisions. Fleet management technology is being adopted by many business owners and it is gradually improving. Soon, better maintenance cost, fuel consumption, operational efficiency, and speedy responses will be provided by the system. The system also offers geo-fencing, real-time decision-making capability, and customized dashboards etc.
2). Transit Management.
Passengers can get the benefits from the Public Transit Management system. Earlier it was a challenge to predict the exact time of vehicle arrival and to know its particular stop. IoT has made the information available in real-time. In this system, data that has to be tracked is usually sent either to the data center or to the central system after which it is being sent to internet-enabled mobile devices.
IoT has removed all challenges that were faced earlier in the public transit systems. Re-routing feature of IoT makes enable the people to take an alternative when they find an issue in real-time tracking of the system.
3). Smart Inventory Management.
The real-time inventory management can help in getting the actual status of the warehouse, production center, and the distribution center. Due to these features, inventory management costs are reduced significantly and maintenance gets improved. Even quality and the level of information that is provided by the system strengthens traditional or legacy inventory management system.
4). Maximal Asset Utilization.
With the help of the transport management system, asset tracking became much faster and easier. Even physical assets can be tracked and managed online in the real-time. All related information like their location, status, and other information can be managed or tracked easily. The truck owner can know the actual load of their truck and its location as well. Asset’s latitude and longitude can be known through IoT. Threshold and tolerance of the device can be known by the advanced analytics system and used to manage the trucks ahead.
5). Geo-Fencing.
Geo-fencing is the advanced form of GPS that can capture the asset location or device location with the help of coordinates of that area. Automated tasks can also be started with the help of Geo-fencing. If a driver deviates from a pre-specified path then you will receive the alert, and it may impact your delivery time directly.
Conclusion:
This technology that is known as IoT has manifested paper logs because this is a cloud-based and digital monitoring system. This system helps in getting information about things in the real-time. Transparency and accountability have also been increased that has made the system cost-effective and time-saving. IoT has changed the way how business operations were performed earlier especially for the transportation industry.
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