During the last decades, with the proliferation of satellite
services, cellular communication and mobility, many firms entered into the vehicle
tracking and tracing business, offering simple location services. The main usage
of such services is in the event of vehicle theft. Is mostly used by
professional operation centers that can, in some cases, even rescue the stolen
assets.
As time passed, such firms enriched the offering, by adding
more services such as: temperature monitoring, door opening and graphic
presentation of all assets on a map. This fact gave fleet owners the freedom to
monitor assets on the move, converting soon to a real fleet management system.
Recently, more sophisticated devices can connect into the
data communication bus of the vehicle (CANBUS) and read part of the flow of mechanical
parameters between the different on-board computers. The raw data can be stored
or transmitted to the fleet manager. But such crude data have no use for the
owner, as it contains huge amounts of codes, without any feasible way to sort,
digest and define an action.
As a matter of fact, all those systems are cost-centers
for fleet owners, as they are paying modest monthly fees but getting the payoff
only in case of problem. Therefore the industry is moving toward converting
telematics to a profit-center.
Only a handful of the top telematics providers is capable of
analyzing the diagnostic trouble codes. Traffilog for example, added several
layers of Business Intelligence (BI), by selectively collecting data, analyzing
it at the vehicle level and transmitting only meaningful events and
action-driven alerts to the fleet manager.
The art of telediagnostics does not stop here: Traffilog can
even predict future failure of components and schedule predictive maintenance
cycles, based on real-time data analysis. The data are correlated with GPS
location and G maneuvers, as well as with other analogue or digital sensors.
