A Diagnostic Approach for Advanced Tracking of Commercial Vehicles With Time Window Constraints

In this paper, we introduce a fleet supervision system used to monitor on-road evolutions of commercial transport vehicles. This monitoring is accomplished by the automatic dispatch, during crossing of a tracking location, of information issued from the localization system on the vehicle. This information can be sent to a server through a direct Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol connection in a general packet radio service network (GPRS) or through a satellite network. The information is provided by the system to some allowed users via an Internet website. The fleet supervision system also enables analyzing messages sent by vehicles to identify differences between real data and planned data. We are more particularly interested in the diagnostics of delays, which can take place during deliveries. In fact, while crossing already fixed tracking locations, these delays are detected as early as possible, and their consequences are predicted so that corrective or preventive actions are undertaken as soon as possible.