Fleet Management: Advantages and Disadvantages

This page covers the advantages and disadvantages of Fleet Management System architecture. It mentions the benefits and drawbacks of Fleet Management.

What is Fleet Management System Architecture?

Introduction: Fleet management is a system that utilizes applications or technology to track and manage various types of vehicles, including cars, cargo logistics assignments, luxury buses, ambulance assignments, ships, and more. The fleet management system also maintains records of vehicles, such as purchase, rental, or lease information, driver records, fuel information, GPS records, and so on.

The system employs fleet management software that keeps all the reports and sends emails according to the stored email database. There are two main types of GPS tracking: active and passive. Active GPS tracking uses a wireless network to transmit real-time location and other information about the fleet. Passive GPS tracking uses a tracking device that stores the tracking data, which can be downloaded and viewed when the vehicle returns from the trip.

Fleet Management System Architecture

As shown, the fleet management system consists of vehicles equipped with GPS, GNSS, or similar tracking devices, a cellular network, GPS satellites, servers, and computing devices with an internet connection.

Let’s understand how a fleet management system works:

• As shown, a vehicle obtains its location information using its GPS receiving device with the help of GPS satellites.
• The GPS sentence carries latitude, longitude, altitude, and time readings obtained from GPS satellites. The extracted GPS information is transmitted to servers using cellular connectivity. The cellular network can be either GSM (2G), CDMA (3G), LTE (4G), or 5G NR (New Radio).
• Popular servers used for IoT applications include Thinkspeak IoT server, AWS cloud server, IBM cloud server, Google Cloud IoT, Microsoft’s open cloud server, etc.
• The API is used to store data from vehicles using HTTP or MQTT protocols over the internet to the servers.
• Similarly, stored data on servers can be retrieved by mobile phone application software or a website using HTTP/MQTT protocols over the internet.
• The fleet management software application or website can be used on various computing devices such as mobile phones, tablets, desktops, or laptops.

Benefits or Advantages of Fleet Management

Following are the benefits or advantages of Fleet Management:

1. It improves productivity by saving delivery time due to the use of advanced route information and traffic alerts.
2. It helps to reduce the cost of fuel.
3. It ensures the safety of vehicles, drivers, and goods.
4. It provides the real-time location of fleets and serves customers in a better way.
5. It helps in saving maintenance costs by maintaining the fleet effectively.
6. It reduces the risk of theft and road accident chances, hence decreasing insurance costs.

Drawbacks or Disadvantages of Fleet Management

Following are the drawbacks or disadvantages of Fleet Management:

1. Active tracking-based fleet management requires monthly subscription charges and data usage charges.
2. It is difficult to manage and maintain a fleet management system due to the use of multiple technologies such as cloud servers, cellular wireless systems, fleet management software, etc.
3. It requires skilled resources to maintain such a system, which increases maintenance costs.
4. GPS devices used in fleet management are power-hungry, which drains the battery faster.
5. GPS signals do not penetrate walls, solid structures, underwater environments, or dense trees. Hence, it is difficult to track the fleet when they are in such regions or behind such locations.