Tech Talk

Eye In The Sky

Vehicle Tracking Systems can help hotels keep a tab on routes and locations of vehicles used for their operations to gain an upper hand in effectively handling transport-related discrepancies, says Savio Rodrigues

Imagine this! Oblivious to a hidden agenda on the cards, your hotel vehicle has being assigned to drop the finance clerk of your company to the company’s respected bank of affairs in order to deposit a large sum of money. However, your finance clerk and the driver of the hotel vehicle abscond with the money.

Let us take into account another situation where the hotel driver being assigned to pick and drop guests to their required destinations invariably shoots up a high petrol bill. But then you have no way of verifying the facts of his explanation or debate the routes the driver takes in order to prove a discrepancy in facts submitted, specially given the current traffic scenario in most cities.

Or for that matter, let us take into account a situation wherein the inventory of your food stock, during delivery, always falls short. You suspect that your driver and delivery person in-charge are hand-in-glove in the swindle, but have no concrete evidence to prove that an unscheduled stop was made midway to divert the stocks.

The market, and not just in the hospitality industry, is rife with such incidents wherein companies face a considerable loss of revenue as well as goodwill when transport-oriented discrepancies are involved.

Sorting Out Solutions

Does the hospitality and its allied industry work towards implementing better security measures, better inventory control or ensure they hire more trustworthy staff? The choices are innumerable. What if a technology could be devised to monitor vehicles at every corner and turn? What if we could assure ourselves of absolutely no lacunae in tracking people we hire to ply our vehicles?

Such a possibility seems like a scene out of the Tom Cruise movie ‘Minority Report’ - but however the concept of Vehicle Tracking Systems (VTS) has been extensively debated and implemented in the West. Though the concept is currently at a nascent stage in India, certain players like Truck Khoj, Hawkeye VTS, Autocop, etc, have been making in roads in bringing to the forefront the importance of such a technology to all industries. And with hospitality, tourism and its allied industry relying on vehicular transportation, the advent of such a technology in the sector is inevitable.

What Is A VTS?

In order to understand what a VTS is, let us understand what a Global Positioning System is and how it works, as most advanced VTS in the world rely on the GPS system.

Global Positioning System: Global Positioning System (GPS) is a satellite-based navigation system made up of a network of satellites placed into orbit by the US Department of Defense. This technology provides for independent positioning and timing information. Information from this system is captured, analysed and distributed along with other complementary data.

GPS was originally intended for military applications, but in the 1980s, the government made the system available for civilian use. GPS works in any weather conditions, anywhere in the world, 24 hours a day.

The Global Positioning System (GPS) comprises of three parts:

- 24 satellites that orbit the earth

- Ground control stations which monitor the satellites

- GPS receivers that can be attached to persons or animals, or mounted on an object, such as a vehicle

“The satellites are synchronised to emit encoded navigational information (exact positioning and exact time). Any vehicle equipped with a GPS receiver will intercept these transmissions, and using a simple mathematical formula derived from ‘triangulation’ — a process of collecting of signals from three or more satellites in carefully monitored orbit from which the receiver computes its own spatial relationship to each satellite to determine its position — the receiver is able to calculate its own longitude, latitude, velocity and even altitude. For companies implementing GPS applications, this information, most often, will be transmitted to a central or control location,” revealed Quentin D’Souza, managing director, Quantum Designs, designers of Hawkeye VTS - an Internet-based VTS system.

GPS satellites circle the earth twice a day in a very precise orbit and transmit signal information to Earth. GPS receivers take this information and use triangulation to calculate the user’s exact location. Essentially, the GPS receiver compares the time a signal was transmitted by a satellite with the time it was received. The time difference tells the GPS receiver how far away the satellite is. Now, with distance measurements from a few more satellites, the receiver can determine the user’s position and display it on the unit’s electronic map.

A GPS receiver must be locked on to the signal of at least three satellites to calculate a two-dimensional position (latitude and longitude) and track movement. With four or more satellites in view, the receiver can determine the user’s three-dimensional position (latitude, longitude and altitude). Once the user’s position has been determined, the GPS unit can calculate other information, such as speed, bearing, track, trip distance, distance to destination, sunrise and sunset time and more.

The fundamental concept of GPS applications is that you can determine fairly accurately (ordinarily within 10-30 meters) the location of any device that has a GPS transceiver mounted inside the device. Having determined the location of an object, one can track its movement thereon. Therefore, you can implement a number of business and personal applications based on this location, like fleet management and number delivery services.

VTS is basically an advanced method of remote tracking and monitoring of vehicles using GPS. In simple words, when a VTS is installed in a vehicle of choice, it could track the vehicle using either the Internet or a short messaging service (SMS) facility depending on the mode of communications utilised by the VTS service provider.

“Each vehicle is equipped with a module that receives signals from a series of satellites, and calculates its current geographical location, speed, and heading. This information can be stored for later retrieval or, frequently, transmitted to a control location where it is displayed on a high-resolution geographical map,” revealed D’Souza.

With technology today certainly in the forefront of hotel related activities, the adoption of a system such as VTS that helps in tracking routes and locations of a vehicle will give hotels an upper hand in effectively handling scenarios mentioned at the beginning of this article, as well as offer hotels a preventive mechanism for the future.