Remote Monitoring of Vehicle Diagnostics and Location Using a Smart Box with Global Positioning System and General Packet Radio Service

This paper presents a distributed system for remote monitoring of vehicle diagnostics and geographical position. This is achieved by using on-board microcomputer system, called on-board smart box (OBSB), general packet radio service (GPRS) and a remote server. The OBSB which is equipped with an integrated global positioning system (GPS) receiver is empowered by a software application that manages the processes of local data acquisition and transmission of the acquired data to the remote server via GPRS. When programmed with speed limits in a certain geographical region, the OBSB allows the traffic control authority to supervise violations of speed limits from inside vehicles rather than outside supervision via certain check points. Appropriate vocal and text warning messages are issued when a vehicle exceeds the permitted speed limit at a certain location. A prototype system is designed and implemented with a small number of sensors. On-road experiments have demonstrated the robustness, efficiency and applicability of the proposed system.