[Talk-in] vehicle tracking system

[Sudev Barar]

On 3 September 2010 07:53, Kenneth Gonsalves <lawgon at au-kbc.org> wrote:
> A person has a fleet of vehicles and wants to implement a tracking
> system using OSM for his fleet of taxis. He wants to know where each
> vehicle is at any given time as well as find the nearest free vehicle to
> any given point and also calculate the closest routes for his vehicles
> to follow. So how should this be set up? What are recommendations wrt to
> hardware and software required?

Have implemented a system using OSM/GMaps for a client up to point of
knowing where each vehicle is and free busy information. Not the best
route to destination. The latter is best implemented by in-car
equipments with display and local maps. For remote tracking the in car
GPS transmits location by GPRS/SMS to the server which interprets the
location and displays it on the map.

One problem is the quality of in car hardware. The local hardware
antennae are bad and the whole construction is not built to last.
Devices imported from China range from poor to reasonable. Best
devices are ones with internal antennae.

Second problem is that imports need license as customs (at least in
Delhi) interpret use of GPRS by GSM devices as using radio radio
transmission and slap a penalty if imported. For the moment my
customer is trying to get a import license to make sense of customer
pricing.

On the maps side OSM, while growing in information, lacks lots of
details so we ended up giving option to the customer to use either.
The solution was used by them to even do tracking of rally cars during
and event with up to date information when a car breaks down and stops
moving.

-- 
Regards,
Sudev Barar
Read http://blog.sudev.in for topics ranging from here to there.

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