Design And Implementation Of A Fleet Management System

The need for an improved customer service, a minimization of operational cost and a better management of resources has led many transportation companies to search more innovative and convenient solutions to handle efficiently the needs of theirs customers. With the rapid development of information and Communications Technology (ICT), these solutions became more feasible. Thus the ICT enable companies operating fleets of units, i.e. ships or vehicles, to manage their assets in a new way. Fleet management is the process by which a transportation company can manage (monitor) its transportation fleet and increase its efficiency. The functions included in modern fleet management system are purposed to address a series of operational issues which may vary depending on the type of fleet, however some well know issues are vehicles and human resources management, vehicle routing and monitoring, driving assistance, fuel management, task optimization, safety management and so and so forth. The research conducted in this thesis relates to the design and the implementation of fleet management solution for a wastewater transportation company.In this paper, the proposed fleet management system core functionality consist of route optimization and fleet information management. Finding a more productive and effective routes for the trucks is one of the problems our system must solve. Route optimization work is a complex process which belongs to Vehicle Routing Problems (VRP). In fact for big size data set utilizing the traditional optimization methods and techniques, routing problems become unsolvable. The reasons behind that complexity and the alternative solution approaches (heuristics) to tackle it are detailed in this paper. The proposed system also aim to provide an improved vehicles monitoring system which uses today modern positioning technologies. Thus modern positioning systems are also introduced, with a particular emphasis on the Global Positioning System (GPS) and the Geographical Information System (GIS). A detailed design phase was essential to build the actual solution, and the outcomes of the design process which consist of a requirement specification, a model design and a test plan are all covered in this thesis. Following the system design process, component parts such as the graphical user interface and communication of the final system have been implemented. All the results related to the implementation, including the optimization algorithm choice and results comparison are reported in this thesis as well. After implementation and testing, we discuss and summarize the present work and give recommendation for future ones.