Application of IoT technologies in the control and monitoring of road freight transport

Abstract

Freight transport of goods and raw materials is a main part of the supply chain in the commercial exchange in Latin America. Control and monitoring of this activity are vital for an efficient economic flow and more importantly without losing money. Most of the problems that generate economic losses occur in cargo freight by land. Losses due to changes in the weight of the payload to be transported or fuel/time losses due to capricious changes by the driver on the scheduled route. This work aims to demonstrate use of Internet of Thing (IoT) techniques to propose a prototype of a telemetry system to monitor in real-time the payload weight and location of a cargo truck and become a technological tool that supports the tasks of monitoring and control of the use of cargo trucks, and together with other logistics measures, leads to minimizing economic losses. The development of this project was based on the IoT architecture reference model: an ATmega32u4 microcontroller was used together with a SIM808 GSM and GPS module as the main component of the IoT Node. In addition, Amazon Web Services (AWS) tools were used as an IoT web platform and cloud data storage. The main result was a prototype of a telemetry system to track a cargo truck via the web, the weight and position data are accessible from any device with internet access through a website. Preliminary field tests have been successful and have shown the proposed system to be an efficient and low-cost option.