REAL-TIME TRACKING AND INCIDENCES MANAGEMENT

Improving the Transportation of Industrial Equipment through an ICT Solution

Asier San Nicolás, Ignacio Angulo, Asier Perallos and Nekane Sainz

Deusto Institute of Technology - DeustoTech, University of Deusto, Avenida de las Universidades 24, 48007, Bilbao, Spain

Keywords: Goods traceability, Transportation of industrial equipment, Fleet management, Incidence recovery.

Abstract: This paper describes an ICT solution for real-time tracking and fleet management which can be applied in

distribution of industrial equipments, in order to improve the traceability of such goods. The solution

includes a support sys-tem for the driver that is capable of reporting the route that has to be followed and

notifying incidences that occur during the trip, resolving them as soon as possible. A first prototype has

been developed and its functionality validated through a simple test case. In addition, future actions to

improve the system are shown.

1 INTRODUCTION

In few years, logistics processes have improved

substantially resulting in an increase of the

productivity, competitiveness and quality of

services, through new technologies (Cleland, 2007).

There are three main industries: agricultural,

pharmaceutical and the unexplored sector of the

distribution and transportation of equipments where

traceability, as well as the capacity to get an efficient

fleet management, route planning and incidences

recovery, will increase the productivity of the

manufacture companies.

The result of the work described in this paper is

an ICT solution for real-time tracking and fleet

management which can be applied in the

transportation and distribution of manufacture

equipment. This innovative solution is able to

manage routes, as well as onboard support to the

carriers, enabling an agile response to incidences. In

following sections the related work, the context as

well as its functional requirements, technical

description, challenges and innovative contributions

are presented to end with a prototype and some

results obtained in a test scenario.

2 RELATED WORK

The importance of tracking goods has reached such

a point that is being regulated by law in some

countries. For example in Europe, Regulation

178/2002. This is one of the reasons because most of

the projects about tracking are focused on the food

industry, the Trace FP6 project or those ones based

on RFID technology and described in (Abad, 2009);

(Kelepouris, 2007); (Manikas, 2009). There are

other critical sectors as the pharmaceutical one.

Thus, the PharmaX initiative is proposed to shed

light on the pharmaceutical traceability and overall-

process regulation, (Huang, 2010). Other related

challenge is the use of ICT to improve logistic

processes in intermodal transportation, as is being

done in TIMI project.

When performing, they are seeking the following

benefits: processes automation, turnover increase,

and stock management improvement (Bertolini,

2010). Other sectors are for example, Galeria

Kaufhod in retail clothing market using RFID to

automate logistics processes of the store, (Al-

Kassab, 2010) and Dell Company who changed

from barcodes to RFID (Crowl, 2006).

The transportation of industrial equipment has

some additional technological challenges to be

faced, such as interoperability with manufacturing

information systems, real-time fleet and goods

traceability, management and monitoring of the

route and job actions, providing of onboard

information to carriers, and real-time incidence

management and recovery. The result of our work is

an ICT solution with real-time tracking capacities

for improving the incidence recovery timing in the

transportation of industrial equipments.

210

San Nicolás A., Angulo I., Perallos A. and Sainz N..

REAL-TIME TRACKING AND INCIDENCES MANAGEMENT - Improving the Transportation of Industrial Equipment through an ICT Solution.

DOI: 10.5220/0003498402100213

In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Software and Database Technologies (ICSOFT-2011), pages 210-213

ISBN: 978-989-8425-76-8

 2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

3 FUNCTIONALITY AND

TECHNICAL FEATURES

The scope of the project covers all the stages

included in the distribution process of industrial

equipment. At this point, functionalities, (Figure 1),

and its technical implementation are described.

Departure

Load Part #8311882

SMC Fo un dr y

Load Part

#2721126

#8332117

GF Group Industrial Plant

Deal Pa rt

Load Part

#2721126

#1582354

#8823456

Abandeo Wind Farm

Assemble Parts

Deal Pa rt

#8311882

#1582354

#8823456

#8332117

Arrival at depot

Figure 1: Architecture of the proposed solution.

3.1 Planning, Route Monitoring and

Job Actions Management

The planning server receives information about the

pieces that will be needed to transport. This is done

by integrating our server with the Product Data

Management (PDM) system. The integration is done

using SOAP messages to a web service developed

for the PDM system. As result, the planning server

can get information about the materials needed for

each task, their physical characteristics, the place of

collection and delivery, and all actions needed for

final assembly of parts. This information is used to

generate truck routes. The actions included are the

collection or loading of materials, unloading and

subsequent assembly and installation of different

components that make up each end equipment, so as

maintenance activities required by them. Once

established the routes through a simple algorithm,

these are sent to the staff by the “carriers supporting

device” to be executed in the shortest possible time.

This route is stored in what has been called a route

document, which is an XML with a unique identifier

that includes hierarchically the stops on the route,

the actions to be carried out at each stop and parts

involved in every action. Both route points as

actions are displayed in the order they should be

performed. It should be mentioned that after

delivering it to each vehicle it can be dynamically

altered during the course if it is necessary.

Any transfer of information between planning

server and each onboard device will be carried out

by sharing and updating this document.

3.2 Fleet Online Tracking and

Traceability of Parts

The document with the route and list of actions is

stored in an onboard mobile device, implemented on

a smart phone. This device is responsible for sending

periodically the position of each vehicle, so all

vehicles can be monitored through a basic real-time

fleet tracking system as well as storing routes

performed by each vehicle for further analysis.

Moreover, all the parts handled by the system are

labeled with an RFID tag that allows tracking and

ensures the proper selection of the different parts

involved in each job action. Traceability of the parts

is performed by the carrier with the help of a

portable RFID reader. The information stored by the

tracking system can locate the source of each piece

installed in an equipment and the current location of

each piece supplied.

3.3 Carriers Supporting Device

Each employee responsible for a vehicle has a

mobile which hosts a resident application, with

driving support to reach each stop on the route

established, and which shows the list of job actions

to be carried out at each point, the parts or materials

involved in a particular action, and allows validating

the implementation of these actions through the

traceability system. In addition, through GPS,

system notices the driver when is arriving to a point

of the route, helping him find the place.

3.4 Incidences Management

The system distinguishes between manual incidence

(required by a worker) and automatic (directly sent

by the mobile device); and from emergency

incidence, which must be notified immediately to

the planning server, or informative because it does

not significantly affect how the transport service is

done. When materials are being recorded by RFID

and a product that should not be read is registered

(part is not included in the route document) or when

concluding an activity without validating document

specifications, an automatic incidence is generated

and written in the XML file, indicating the details

and where it has occurred. Apart from this, the

application allows writing an incidence manually by

the driver himself filling out a simple form. If in this

form the incidence is marked as urgent, it is sent to

REAL-TIME TRACKING AND INCIDENCES MANAGEMENT - Improving the Transportation of Industrial Equipment

through an ICT Solution

211

the scheduler at the time. In these cases the

scheduler can plan again the route of one or more

trucks, shorten the route of the truck concerned or

just do nothing.

4 TESTING AND EVALUATION

In order to validate the system developed, a test

route has been created for a truck with 3 stops:

Gamesa, Acciona WindPower and WindFarm “La

Muela”, which must initially be accessed

sequentially. At each stop, a number of actions must

be made: in Gamesa, to charge 3 turbines of type A

and a propeller blade of type A; in Acciona

WindPower, to discharge the propeller blade of type

A and to charge two propeller blades of type B and

one turbine of type B; finally, in WindFarm “La

Muela”, to discharge 3 turbines of type A, one

turbine of type B and two propeller blades of type B.

See the route details in Table 1.

This route will test the basic functionality of the

current system: communication platform, fleet and

foods tracking, on board support information, and

incidence detection. Other capacities, such as

intelligent planning of routes and job actions, will be

developed and tested in the future.

Table 1: The initial route, its location coordinates and the

job actions Numbers in brackets represent the units

Place Long. Lat. Act. Parts

Gamesa

-2.8587 43.2855

C / C Turbine A(3)/

Blade A (1)

Acciona

Wind

Power

-1.6391 42.6119

D/C/C Blade A (1)/

Turbine B (1)/

Blade B (2)

Wind

Farm -1.1575 41.5930

D/D/D Turbine A(3)/

Turbine B(1)/

Blade B (2)

C:Charge. D:discharge

Once the carrier is authenticated by the mobile

solution, the route of Table 1 is downloaded from

the Planning Server. Once route is shown by the

mobile application, transport service starts driving to

the first destination. Fig. 2 shows how the Planning

Server is receiving positioning from each vehicle.

When vehicle approaches the desired place

(Gamesa), the location icon in the mo-bile

application changes of color and warns us. Once in

destination, the driver chooses the option “Actions

TODO” in the application menu. After choosing the

action “Charge”, mobile device establishes

Bluetooth connection with the RFID reader and

records appropriate part IDs (turbines of type A and

propeller blade of type A) to complete the action.

Figure 4 shows the user interface of the mobile

application which enables to perform the

functionalities described above.

Once all actions assigned in the first stop are

correctly performed, carrier drives to the second one,

Acciona WindPower, where two actions are

planned. The first one, which is discharge a

propeller blade of type A, is performed validating

the RFID code. And in the second action, which

should be charging one turbine of type B and two

propeller blades of type B, RFID reader only

registers two propeller blades, so when employee

ends this action, the application will alert him

indicating that some materials are missing.

Figure 2: Initial planned route and tracking position.

Figure 3: Carrier support mobile application.

Accepting this issue, an automatic incidence is

automatically sent to the Planning Server. The route

will be changed by adding an additional stop where

retrieve lost (see Figure 4).

This route is sent to our mobile device and with

the updated route we can continue the job. Now we

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have a new stop (Eólicas Riojanas, S.L.) where we

have to collect the material we needed (one turbine

of type B). Thus, arriving at WindFarm “La Muela”,

we can discharge all the components we have.

After finishing the test we can conclude that we

obtain the expected results, detecting incidences in

real time and minimizing the time needed to manage

them.

Figure 5: Route changed: an additional stop.

5 CONCLUSIONS

The result of our current work is an ICT solution

with real-time tracking capacities for improving the

incidence recovery timing in the transportation of

industrial equipments. It is considered an innovative

solution because it faces technological challenges

concerning to this transport, such as interoperability

with manufacturing information systems, real-time

fleet and goods traceability, management of the

route and job operations, onboard information to

carriers, and real-time incidence management and

recovery. Now, a first prototype has been

successfully validated.

The current implementation of the system uses

passive RFID tags that should be verified by a

portable HF RFID reader which connects to the

mobile device by simply sending ID codes of the

RFID tags. These passive tags can be replaced by

active ones which can store more information and

improve the reach of the reader. In that way, the

employee does not have to validate each individual

piece with the portable RFID reader, but can

perform the tasks of loading and unloading of

materials being automatically validated.

Consequently the traceability of goods can be

carried out in a non-intrusive way (without

modifying the behavior of transport staff). This will

made the system portable to other areas such as rail

or pharmaceutical. Other important aspect of future

work must be to improve the way in which the

planning of the routes and job actions is done,

because a non-automatic process is used in this

moment. A higher level of automation in the task of

rescheduling, based-on the use of Artificial

Intelligence techniques, is a desirable issue.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work has been funded by the Ministry of

Industry, Tourism and Trade of Spain under Avanza

funding program (Grant TSI-020100-2008-582).

Special thanks to Avangroup Business Solutions,

S.L. for their support.

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