Our client from Saudi Arabia wanted to build a tracking system for transit trucks that enables the monitoring of cargo and vehicles through a GPS device and associated electronic locks to ensure the integrity of the shipment while travailing through the country from the time of entry till it exits the right designating border points.

The system should provide the capability to track transit trucks from border to border and notify of any violations to make sure it will maintain the planned course and secure the cargo while in the country.

Solutions

After on-site visit of our client team members to Vertis Microsystems office in India, Vertis Microsystems developed Transit Tracking solution (both Web and mobile based) that provides total solution for Authority who wish to track and manage vehicles and their cargo during transit passage through Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Built around carefully designed and engineered Location products, it tracks the precise location and status of truck and containers and displays this valuable data to control staff at remote locations, in real time.

The solution generates alarms to control staff if predefined rules are violated, such as unauthorized stops, deviations from planned routes, unauthorized tampering with equipment or cargo. This event driven approach enables control of vehicles and their loads to be managed by exception.

Mobile customs officers can also access the system via GPRS from their PDAs – this allows for impromptu spotchecks to be carried out.

Workflow

• Starting a trip
• Entering the Region
• En-route inside the Region
• Alarms
• Completing a trip
• Reporting
• Tracking Device
• Lock Device

Features

• Mapping Platform
• Exception Alerts (SMS, Email, Push notifications, Geofence breach alerts)
• Customer Maps
• Fleet Tracking Reports
• Geofencing
• Mobile Apps
• Historical fleet data
• Hierarchy capabilities with different roles and permissions
• Dashboard Interface

Benefits

• Extend the life of your fleet – schedule, track, and receive alerts
• Cut your fleet size & costs
• Theft recovery
• Reduce labor costs
• Improve response times with real time tracking
• Improve fleet safety

Challenges

Scalability and Real-time Updates
Scalability is a very important consideration for this Transit Tracking System as the solution must be capable of tracking locations of about 15,000 vehicles in near-real-time.

Security
Given the nature of the application, it is important that the system be designed to use state-of-the-art security at all levels. All client-server communication shall use HTTPS protocol to protect the data during transit. The data stored on the device is protected using encryption by a key generated by the key server.

Tracker Device Integration
Our developed system provides easy integration with the tracker devices during association and disassociation. This is needed so that the trip details obtained from NEBRAS system can be securely transferred to the tracker device and the transit details recorded on the device can be transferred back to the Transit Tracking System.

Integration with External Systems
The system of record for all vehicle data, trip plans etc. is the NEBRAS system. Our solution must integrate with this in a read-write mode i.e. all authorized vehicle and trip details should be obtained from NEBRAS, while all trip updates should be published to NEBRAS.

Tools and Technology

• Java Enterprise version is be the primary stack for the location server
• JMS/Redis + Storm based fault-tolerant parallelization infrastructure
• Oracle database for persistent data storage
• Google Maps API for displaying maps and routes
• C# .Net for windows based client for customs workstation and monitoring client
• Android based mobile/PDA application