Vehicular data acquisition system for fleet management automation

This paper presents a vehicular data acquisition and analysis system for fleet management automation. It exploits On-Board Diagnostic (OBD), GPS, RFID, and WiFi technologies. Although many systems currently integrate position tracking, OBD and wireless networking to allow for remote position tracking and remote diagnostic system, few systems provide the capability to automate the fleet management process. This paper describes a vehicle embedded data acquisition system places in vehicle as well as a database server and web interface for fleet management automation. This system design is based on wireless networking technology (WiFi), which does not need a base station to upload the collected data to a web server. Data collected in a database forms the basis for decision making, performance monitoring, remote diagnostics, and vehicle and driver performance optimization. The main parts of this system are in-vehicle embedded system, and vehicle monitor server and database. The in-vehicle embedded system obtains the location of the vehicle from GPS receiver, the vehicle status from OBD interface, and the driver ID from the RFID. Then the in-vehicle embedded system connects the vehicle to web server through WiFI network to transmit the collected data when vehicle return to the parking place. Besides the reliability and cost effectiveness of this system, it also can be exploited for inter-vehicle communication and traffic monitoring.