Truck transportation generates roughly $250 billion in revenue annually in the United States. Trucking companies invest billions of dollars in equipment and infrastructure to ensure that shipments arrive on-time and intact.
Refrigerated semi-trailers containing food and other goods that need to be kept cold have unique constraints that can be a challenge for a trucking company. For example, a trucking company needs to be able to ensure and even prove that its cargo was kept within a certain temperature range during transit. A damaged refrigeration unit, an open door, or mechanical problems with the vehicle can prove to be catastrophic for a refrigerated shipment.
Transportation managers need to be able to remotely access a variety of system and sensor data on a refrigerated semi-trailer truck, such as cargo temperature, door and hitch sensors, vehicle diagnostics and real-time location. Digi’s Drop-in Networking technology makes it possible for transportation companies to remotely monitor multiple data points on a single truck in real-time and can extend that monitoring ability out to an entire fleet of vehicles.
By outfitting a truck and trailer with a variety of temperature, pressure, proximity and mechanical sensors connected to XBee and XBee-PRO embedded RF modules, the trucking company is able to create a self-discovering wireless mesh network on the truck. A ConnectPort X5 gateway with onboard GPS receives data from each of the sensors and the vehicle bus interface (J1939 or J1708). The gateway sends this information back to a central location over a cellular network when it is on the road or through a Wi-Fi connection when it reaches its destination.
Once the fleet data is stored on secure Device Cloud by Etherios servers, the company writes a custom application to organize the data and provide real-time alerts via email or SMS when critical events are triggered on the semi-trailer truck.
Some of the key benefits of using Digi’s Drop-in Networking technology and Device Cloud in this application include:
- Early diagnosis and repair of maintenance issues protects against loss and minimizes downtime.
- Self-forming wireless mesh network allows the pairing of different trucks and trailers and requires no additional work.
- Data is easily accessible to a variety of stakeholders using Device Cloud services.
