Axeda has a comprehensive set of capabilities for building location-based services into your solutions. These services are based on a tracking device attached to your assets which can report the asset’s location (e.g., from GPS), as well as other sensor inputs.
The platform keeps track of your assets’ location, so you can:
- Simply locate your assets. They may be slow-moving like vending machines or leased equipment, or fast-moving like trucks or goods moving through the supply chain. Businesses need to inventory their assets each year, and they need to write off whatever they can’t locate.
- Locate the assets within a defined area.
- Calculate distance traveled. Pay-as-you-drive insurance calculates your insurance rate based on driving habits, such as miles driven and maximum distance from your house.
A fundamental capability of Axeda Platform is to abstract the tracking device from the asset you care about. This is done through Asset Associations. The concept is simple – you associate a tracking device with an asset. The locations, data, and alarms from the device are associated with the asset. The device’s lifetime is less than most assets (the battery dies, the device gets damaged or a new technology is introduced) so when you install a new tracking device on the asset, you just associate the new device to the asset. The history of locations, data, and alarms stays with the asset.
It’s impractical to rely on a given type of asset having the same model of tracking device. Once you’ve defined the data and rules that apply to a given type of asset, the platform takes care of any formatting differences needed to communicate with different tracking devices.
Use Geofences to react to changes in location
To simplify processing of asset locations, the platform includes support for geofences, which define particular geographic areas in the real world. You can define a circular area by specifying a center point and radius, or a polygonal area by specifying a series of points connected by straight lines. The format used for geofences is called Well-known Text. Geofences may be named and stored, or defined on the fly.
Geofences can be downloaded to a device and used in threshold rules to react to changes in the asset’s location, by triggering a rule when the asset enters or leaves a particular area. For example, a notification can be generated when a truck is approaching a depot so that the depot is ready to load or offload the truck quickly and efficiently. Or an alarm can generated if a truck does not arrive at an intermodal transfer point in time to transfer its container to rail.
Geofences can also be used on the Axeda Platform. The Extensible Rules Engine includes many functions for processing locations and geofences, including DistanceToGeofence() and InGeoFence(). For example:
IF: InNamedGeofence(“Prohibited Zone”, location)
THEN: CreateAlarm(“Asset has entered the prohibited zone”, 100)
Where ‘location’ is a variable provided by the system which gives the assets location, and ‘100’ is the severity of the alarm to be created.
Your solution can use a state machine for each asset to further refine how the rules engine processes information from an asset. For example, a truck in “repair” state should not leave the repair depot (defined by a geofence). To enforce this rule, the expression rule is attached to the state, like so:
Making use of location information
In addition to reacting to asset location, you can build applications which use the asset location data stored on the platform. The platform provides two types of information you can take advantage of:
- the location of a particular asset, or
- a list of the assets (of a particular type, etc.) within a given area.
And you can use both of these types of information together. For example, if one of your trucks breaks down, and you want to send another truck to offload it, you could:
- Query the location of the broken truck;
- Define a geofence centered on the location of the broken truck and with a radius of, say, five miles;
- Retrieve all the trucks within the geofence (and so within five miles of the broken truck);
- Retrieve the load on each truck and choose one or more trucks which have the capacity to offload the broken truck;
- Communicate with your ERP system to dispatch the chosen trucks.
Your applications can make use of mapping services (such as Google Maps) to display locations on a map, or translate between street addresses and locations. For example, you can display the assets found within a geofence on a map rather than as a list of latitude-longitude pairs. This obviously allows users to interact with your products more easily. For example, a hungry person with a smart phone could locate the nearest vending machine that contained their favorite snack.
The Axeda Platform keeps a log of all the data sent to it, including the location data. The fact that the platform maintains a history of the asset's movements, with the ability to query for the location at a particular time in the past, means that you can correlate locations and external events. For example, where was a truck when the contents overheated?
Using location information on the device
Every asset connected to the Axeda Platform can report its location at whatever interval it chooses. To minimize communication costs, you can define Threshold Rules on the Axeda Platform which can are downloaded to your tracking devices and control when each device will report data from its sensors. For example, a device might communicate with the Axeda Platform if the asset has moved five miles since the last report or the temperature is out of range.
Next steps
If you haven’t completed the Getting Started tutorial, now would be a good time to look at it. It includes a graphic demonstration of how location can be reported and displayed using the Axeda Platform.
There is also a tutorial on how to create and edit geofences.
