Contact us anytime to know more — Amit A., Founder & COO CISIN
It takes people to work in the morning, carries goods all over the world, delivers food to groceries and then even our doorstep and even encourages us to venture all over the world and travel to the farthest corners of the earth.
Most of us view the transportation system to be quite cumbersome, conventional industry. Back in the 18th century, most of the people wouldn’t have imagined that cars would become an essential part of society.
The invention of the motor car has been revolutionary, and then the trucks, followed by train and finally the airplane. This industry allows us to access shipping easily, public transit, ride-sharing, and offer us an immeasurable amount of ease and convenience.
It can be both conventional and cumbersome at the time, but it is definitely not known from running away from adopting the latest technologies, accepting innovations and adapting to new realities.
Hence, it is no wonder that this particular industry is ripe for the adoption of the Internet of Things. As the Internet of Things solutions are rapidly adopted across various industry verticals, it is happening in the transportation industry too.
System integrators are certainly becoming much more crucial as most of the businesses think about considering expansion into the mostly uncharted territory, which is IoT.
It has been forecasted that the transportation industry will be spending in excess of over $40 billion on IoT, annually by 2020.
Hence, what does it essentially mean for people like us at present? Essentially, it means that people should be expecting the ever-increasing uptake of various IoT technologies to increase drastically, and different kinds of Hi-Tech solutions based on IoT in transportation will certainly be among some of the much more exciting ones to observe and watch as they will certainly change our day to day lives.
Being customers, we will essentially see increased safety, commitment to service by businesses and convenience within the entire industry.
For business people, they should certainly grasp onto the essential importance of these latest technologies as early as possible and tactfully capitalize by becoming early adopters in the entire smart city space that is emerging all around.
Internet of Things Applications (IoT) in Transportation
It is quite essential to understand the entire context of IoT in the transportation industry, but how exactly are these technologies are going actually to look like, is the main question.
What and where should we expect them to find them in the real-world application in transportation essentially?
We have started to witness the inculcation of IoT in the entire transportation industry. These solutions can be a small scale as a simple person-to-vehicle communication system to a large scale as the complete monitoring of the shipping logistics of a certain global company.
Hence, let’s discuss the multiple ways in which IoT is completely changing the way the entire transportation actually takes place in 2020.
1. Vehicle Health Maintenance
People own cars and often don’t know anything about it, and it is generally the case with most of the people. However, it is perfectly fine since cars are quite complicated machines.
Even though an owner of the car or a vehicle should have basic knowledge of the vehicle, but there are certain different working pieces that are quite helpful to keep the car in exquisite condition and out of the mechanic’s garage. These require a much more in-depth knowledge of the complete inner workings of the car along with its components.
However, since, 1996, we have seen the installation of Onboard Diagnostic Ports or OBD in the cars to assist both the manufacturers as well as mechanics to have a bird’s eye view about the vehicle’s health.
Now, consumers have complete access to this particular information through particular devices known as Automatic’s adapter which directly plugs into the vehicle’s OBD port in order to monitor the entire health of the engine as well as a plethora of other capabilities. It makes maintenance of the vehicle less cumbersome and complicated and can certainly save the customers a significant amount of money in maintenance costs of the vehicle.
However, the story doesn’t end here.
Such technology is quite essential for businesses working in this particular industry. Various companies with huge fleets of vehicles essentially spend millions of dollars in huge costs whenever their vehicles break down suddenly in the middle of their route or in the hands of the customers.
With the assistance of IoT, the companies can easily manage the complete performance of their entire fleet irrespective of their location and easily catch problems and issues before they even occur. They can even hire IoT app development company to create an app that delivers the relevant information to them.
Also, companies can easily optimize the other factors which are way beyond the health of the vehicle, such as idle time and fuel consumption.
It, not just assists in cutting costs for these businesses but even relieves the vehicle drivers of monotonous tasks which are often error-prone, such as manual reporting.
2. Traffic Management
No one likes traffic, and it’s a universally established fact. Besides its inherent ability to create frustration and cause instant irritation among the drivers, traffic also wastes millions of gallons of fuel and wastes countless productive work hours of the people.
As per research, commuters spend over 40 years a year just sitting in traffic while commuting in America. However, in the case of highly congested areas, it has been reported to be as high as 80 hours a year.
Hence, IoT, along with IoT applications for smart city, is certainly well-poised to readily address these particular pain points regarding transportation.
Also, IoT has a massive opportunity to easily dissipate this entire routine and even completely avoid the annoyance to the entire society. Even the experts anticipate that the societies will emerge with fully-autonomous vehicles and the self-driving cars will become the major components as a potent cure to traffic.
Whenever a car relies on a rather intelligent sensors in order to communicate with various cars around it, then the entire flow of traffic will certainly become a more constant instant of stop-and-go owing to a few bad drivers. Artificial Intelligence solutions will come to aid in this regard.
Another aspect is that IoT will help in providing smarter route mapping, which will certainly avoid congestion. Companies are already jumping onto this particular business opportunity by essentially allowing the drivers as well as passengers to share their information regarding their route with other vehicle drivers.
Also, with more number of sensors as well as camera-enabled vehicles cruising on the road, there exists an ample opportunity for not only transportation authorities but also businesses to create systems which can optimize routes right in the real-time without actually relying on any sort of input from the humans.
Even car manufacturers are getting into IoT too. Now, they are creating technology within their cars to promptly ease the stress which the traffic actually cause on drivers.
Companies have introduced features which allow the car to match the actual speed of the car that is ahead of it in congestion. This type of speed matching not only ease the mood of the driver but also smooths out the entire traffic flow as well as decreases the entire congestion patterns.
3. Vehicle Ownership Transformation
Among the most interesting future applications of this technology in transportation is concerning vehicle ownership.
As per a recent study, car ownership will certainly decrease by a significant margin. We can already see it happening. Urban people are already selling their cars or not even purchasing one. They are simply using to ride and use vehicle sharing platforms such as Uber and Lyft along with relying on constantly improving public transit systems or transformation services.
Read the blog- What are some good project ideas in IoT that uses Big-Data?
Also, ride-sharing is certainly becoming quite competitive with the average cost of actual car ownership, which includes titling, maintenance, insurance, fuel and much more.
Soon, post-ownership transportation business models might certainly tip the scales for better.
As a number of companies are now turning to adopt IoT, these particular platforms will certainly expand and even get cheaper, which will drive down the overall demand for the ownership of a car.
Hence, how do these companies essentially employing IoT? As known, a vehicle needs to be tracked, irrespective of location and also broadcasted via a platform for the users to easily find and use it.
Companies are already launching car-sharing programs that allow the users to easily unlock their own vehicle of the fleet with their phone and even drive it anywhere within a particular boundary.
Also, a plethora of factors need to be tracked like fuel levels as well as battery health that ties back into IoT enabled fleet management which we will discuss later. These particular systems cannot simply perform without IoT and certainly become much smarter and much more widespread as more number of stakeholders finally enter the game.
4. Fleet Management
When it comes to role of fleet managers, they perform more than just simply managing vehicles. In this regard, IoT can certainly help them achieve much more.
Numerous IoT technologies along with Enterprise Mobility Management can easily be employed to completely track shipments, even optimize the delivery as well as shipping routes, and also cut costs which is associated with various inefficiencies with logistics. Also, incorporating data from road closure memos and weather advisories can assist in operations to run smoothly. Even, it could also inform the various stakeholders of the entire status of the operations in the real-time.
5. Management of Public Transit
Considering public transit systems, they offer multiple benefits to passengers. However, tracking the exact real-time location of the corresponding vehicle and even knowing when it will be actually arriving at a given stop has always been a major challenge.
Since real-time vehicle tracking has been possible now with the assistance of IoT in transportation, so the data which is tracked is directly sent to a transit engineer or to a particular central system and then finally to any internet-enabled mobile device. The IoT has completely eradicated all of the challenges which were often faced in any public transit system and has even deftly enabled re-routing features in order to assist people to make alternative arrangements as real-time vehicle tracking is done.
6. Smart Inventory Management
Internet of Things in Transportation has within the smart inventory management which acts as a certain catalyst that tells the accurate real-time information across the distribution, warehouse, and production center that completely reduces the overall cost of the inventory as well as improves the exact predictive maintenance.
Also, smart inventory management software and systems have completely lowered the entire inventory cost as well as reduced inventory management errors. Also, the quality as well as depth of entire data from the numerous IoT sensors as well as systems have completely strengthened the entire legalized inventory management software.
7. Optimal Utilization of Assets
IoT in case of transportation allows the asset tracking feature that keeps the entire tracking of the various physical assets as well as their information such as status, location, etc.
An AI development company that inculcates IoT app development can provide a solution which can track the real-time location of the vehicles and can easily know the exact load there is on the respective vehicle. Along with this, the longitude and latitude of an asset can easily be acquired by IoT solutions. Along with this, advanced analytics also tracks all of the devices such as axels and sensors, and informs about the tolerance and threshold of the actual device.
8. Geo-fencing
Advanced form of GPS which is Geofencing has emerged from IoT in transportation industry. It actually captures the exact location of any asset or a device along with its coordinates of a given region.
Geo-fencing assists in starting the entire automated tasks. The entire IoT in the transportation industry is benefitted mostly by geo-fencing. Also, it allows the companies to receive alerts whenever any driver deviates from the recommended path, as it can easily create delays in delivery time and also cause accidental loss.
Also, this particular technology allows increased transparency as well as accountability in the transportation industry which makes it even more cost-effective as well as lead to reduced time.
Read the blog- What are some interesting project ideas that combine Machine Learning with IoT?
9. Location management systems
Considering the transportation and logistics domain, the IoT can easily create a much smarter location management system which allows companies to easily track all of the driver activities along with vehicle location as well as delivery status.
After the goods are finally delivered or reached at a certain place, the manager is notified through a push notification. This type of solution is essentially an irreplaceable assistant when it comes to delivery planning as well as compilation and even viewing of schedules.
Different changes are instantly detected and even reflected right in real-time. Hence, IoT technology can readily be used for the improvement of location management as well as streamlining various business processes.
10. Predictive Analytics
When it comes to predictive analytics, it is at the centre stage of various industry verticals, assisting companies as well as organizations in creating effective business development methodologies and strategies, improving their decision-making processes as well as making smarter business insights along with managing risks and much more.
Hence, internet-enabled devices are there to collect huge volumes of data and duly transmit them to a particular central system for much further analysis.
Hence, IoT and predictive analytics solutions may easily be applied for the route as well as delivery planning and even identification of different defects before anything goes horribly wrong. Also, the results are a regular and timely replacement of various machinery parts, preventing any crashes as well as efficient equipment and vehicle maintenance.
Conclusion
Internet of Things has slowly and steadily entered in every industrial domain. It offers breakthrough solutions that improve business processes and operations.
From manufacturing, retail, healthcare, automobile, etc., it has revolutionized various aspects of these industries. Similarly, IoT has huge applications in the transportation industry. With vehicle maintenance, vehicle ownership, etc.
it aids customers in better maintenance of their vehicle. Traffic management application of IoT helps in reducing traffic on busiest of routes and save precious productive hours and reduce stress on drivers.
Also, through fleet management, inventory management, optimal asset utilization, etc. allows the companies to keep track of their fleet, have regular updates on the status of the vehicles, activities of driver and location of the vehicle.
It allows knowing the vehicle health of the entire fleet, which results in regular and timely maintenance and avoid breaking down of vehicles on the route, which can cause delay and results in losses.
Transportation is slowly beginning to rely much more heavily on the Internet of Things. The applications run much more than the ones listed above.
Inculcation of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning with IoT solutions will further revolutionize this industry. Every company in the transportation industry will need to incorporate IoT into its own business in order to beat their competitors and become ready for the future.
