GPS

By knowing the exact location of every tractor and trailer in its fleet, as well as the availability of drivers, J.B. Hunt has improved route efficiency -- an important consideration, with the price of diesel hovering around US$4 per gallon.

"You're seeing a lot of telematics devices being added to the cabs so fleet owners can track vehicles and communicate two ways," says John Yourton, data connectivity product manager at Delphi, which makes mobile electronics and transportation systems. Telematics systems gather global positioning data from GPS devices and transmit it using mobile communications technologies to back-end computing systems that monitor vehicle activity.

J.B. Hunt uses decision-support software to analyze GPS and other vehicle and driver data, and then decides which tractor should be assigned to a given load. "Knowing the location of the driver and the hours the driver has [left to work] has a green benefit," says Drew Schimelpfenig, information systems consultant at the carrier. Reducing the number of miles the vehicle must travel to pick up the next load helps the company save fuel, he says.

J.B. Hunt's fleet management systems also use GPS data to provide the shortest route to a destination and plan routes to send tractors to filling stations with the lowest fuel prices. Dispatch can receive notifications when tractors and trailers depart and when they arrive, receive alerts when a vehicle strays off route, and track exactly when and where each tractor crosses state lines to automatically and more accurately report and calculate state fuel tax fees.

Palmer is still waiting for one important capability: the integration of live feeds on traffic and weather conditions, which will allow the fleet management system to automatically reroute vehicles in real time. Today that's done manually. "You can track weather and traffic, but there's nothing consolidating all the feeds," she says.

Even municipalities can't yet pull this type of information together for their local regions, never mind coordinating at a national scale. "The technology just isn't there," says Palmer. "It's a little further out just because of the amount of integration you'd have to do."

Monitoring systems

The average tractor has more than a half-dozen computers in it that monitor and control everything from engine conditions to traction control and antilock braking systems. Accumulated data is captured by electronic control modules, or ECMs. A central onboard computer mounted inside the cab gathers that data and sends alerts and updates back to headquarters by way of satellite or cellular links.

Carriers have monitored basic vehicle performance and diagnostics data provided by ECMs for years, but as new safety and control systems come online, the level of detail -- and the quantity of information available -- has been increasing. The basic metrics include such things as total miles driven, average fuel economy, idle time and engine diagnostic codes.

ECMs store data and communicate with the truck's other ECMs over a wired onboard network based on a relatively new standard known in the industry as SAE J1939. An increasing array of vehicle diagnostic and monitoring systems are placing data on the J1939 bus, where it can be picked up by the onboard computer and transmitted back to fleet management systems for real-time alerts or trend analysis.

"You have guys who previously were mechanics who now sit at a desk and look at exception reports on computer screens," says Donald Broughton, transportation industry analyst at Avondale Partners, an institutional research and investment banking firm.

In the past, carriers relied exclusively on services that would transmit that data over satellite links. Because bandwidth was expensive, however, the systems performed periodic batch uploads that included only summary data. But carriers are increasingly using less costly cellular networks, and they are transmitting more data back to the operations center, some of it in real time.