Location Aware Delivery Services

(A LBS Solution for Mobile Courier Logistics Tracking)

Reports:

• Brief Presentation (PDF)

Technical Skills:

• J2ME MIDP 2.0
• Wireless Toolkits: Sun, Sony Ericsson, Nokia
• Servlets on Tomcat
• MySQL on Linux
• XML Parsers (kXML)
• Eclipse development environment and EclipseME Plugin

Outline:

It is our belief that location tracking services have immense business utility. Example applications of Location Based Services (LBS) are:

• City taxi service sending automatic pick-up notifications to cab drivers.
• Tacking movement of goods in a Supply Chain Management system.
• Map-Guidance systems for automobile drivers.
• Goods delivery services within the city.
• Assisting rescue workers.
• City traffic management system.

The application designed is described below: "A courier company using location tracking to improve their operational efficiency and offer better customer service."

System Diagram:

Business Case and Application Requirements:

A courier delivery company operates in a metropolitan area. It has field-personnel who deliver or pick up goods from customer's locations. Every field-personnel is allotted certain geographical area to work. Every pickup has to be routed via the central office, where a receipt and delivery slip is generated, goods are sorted area-wise and then dispatched.

Thus a field-personnel makes several trips to the central office every day:

• Collect goods (plus delivery slips) for deliveries in his area.
• Collect acknowledgement slips which are to be delivered to customers in his area.
• Collect list of pick-ups to be made in his area.
• To submit goods which were picked up in his area.
• To submit acknowledgements from the recipients in his area.

The company wants to optimise these operations so that:

• Customers can be assured of a shorter delivery time.
• Field personnnel can deliver/pickup more, with fewer trips.
• Field personnel are provided with assistance to locate addresses.

The following are the suggested requirements:

• Every field personnel carries a portable device running a tracker application.
• By entering a structured address, field-personnel can get a map of the locality. We can exploit an existing map rendering application like Google-maps for this purpose.
• When a customer requests for a pick-up, the request can be automatically forwarded to the field-personnel nearest to the customer.
• If the destination is with the same area as the pickup, the field-personnel can generate electronic delivery slips and directly deliver the goods. There is no need to route the goods from the central office.
• If the destination is in adjacent areas, two field-personnel can synchronize to meet at a nearby location to exchange goods. The goods do not have to be routed via the central office. The application could facilitate such a synchronization.
• The central office should have uptodate information about the status of each field-personnel: What is he delivering right now, What pickups are pending for this person etc.
• Customers can place pick-up requests electronically (digitally signed by the customer). Recipients can send acknowledgement electronically (digitally signed by the recipient). This reduces the number of trips the field personnel have to make, to the central office, to exchange paper-work. Moreover the sender can be given faster acknowledgement of the receipts.
• The tracker application should support disconnectedness. In case the field-personnel cannot connect to the network, they should still be able to perform offline operations (view cached information, update status etc). Once network connection is restored, the mobile node can synchronize its information with the central office.
• Messages exchanged between the mobile nodes and the central service could use SMS transport. Since the network provider charges on a per-SMS basis, the application should optimize the number of messages exchanged.