The Internet of Things: Mobile Food Vendor Tracking

Transcription

1 The Internet of Things: Mobile Food Vendor Tracking Bringing IoT technologies into the government sector. A case study on how a Large City Department of Health could track mobile food vendors and increase operational efficiencies utilizing low powered devices and networks

2 IoT Overview The Internet of things (IoT) is the network of physical devices, vehicles, and other items embedded with electronics, software, sensors, actuators, and network connectivity which enable these objects to collect and exchange data. IoT allows objects to be sensed or controlled remotely across existing network infrastructure, creating opportunities for more direct integration of the physical world into computer-based systems, and resulting in improved efficiency, accuracy and economic benefit in addition to reduced human intervention. Department of Health: The Problem A Large City Department of Health was having issues with finding their mobile food vendors throughout the city. The issue with not being able to locate them is tied to the states regulations on what, where, when, who, and how a vendor can operate a mobile food cart. There are protocols in place to insure the cart does not present a safety hazard and quality checks on the food vendors are providing to reduce food-illness to those who consume a tasty meal on their way to work. The Pilot has been completed and is now in the implementation phase

3 The Solution: Chenoa IoT and Software Application Engineering Enter Chenoa Information Services. Chenoa is a US based, global software engineering company with the expertise to design and architect a solution that meets the City s operational needs at a costeffective price. With our network, device and cloud partners we designed, developed, integrated and implemented the administrative and user interface applications allowing the City real-time views of mobile food vendors, battery life on devices, inspection status and licensing, just to name a few. The LoRaWAN Network The first constraint in finding a solution is cost. GPS is available on all smartphones and allows us to find our friends or track our Uber/Lyft car, but that comes at a price. We needed to identify another technology that would allow for low maintenance, high reliability, and low cost for transmitting and receiving GPS information. The answer is in LoRaWAN technology. LoRaWAN is a Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) specification for wireless battery-operated Things in a regional, national or global network. The network targets key requirements of Internet of Things such as secure bi-directional communication, mobility and localization

4 services. The LoRa specification provides seamless interoperability among smart Things without the need of complex local installations and gives back the freedom to the user, developer, businesses enabling the roll out of Internet of Things. LoRa Devices Now that the Network was identified we needed the hardware device to be attached to the food cart for GPS transmission. We identified a partner who had a new model of LoRa Devices that could withstand harsh environments (snow, rain, and heat) and have a battery life of 2+ years. Those devices where mounted onto all the cities mobile food vendors cart/trucks. IoT Cloud We have the two ends of the solution and now we needed to tie it all together. Utilizing the power of Microsoft s Azure Cloud, we can utilize their IoT suite of products and solutions from streaming data, notification hubs, machine learning, and enhanced security per device. As the number of data points grows our cloud infrastructure grows to provide effortless scalability and reliability.

5 Maintenance: Ongoing Support The solution is in place and now there needs to be a method of being alerted when devices are low on battery, the network is down, or GPS location data wasn t shared to ensure the health department could track their vendors. We developed an operational portal hosted on Azure Cloud which utilizes both Real-Time and REST API s to push/pull data from LoRa Devices and other end user applications. Features include: - GPS Location Maps - Battery Life of Devices - Asset Information - Status of Ping from Network to Device - Status of Network to Azure - Schedule Pings - Alerts and Notifications - User Management - Geo-Fencing - Bar Code- Web Scanner Feature for Associating ID s

6 The Result: Savings So just how much savings is this Department of Health expecting to generate from utilizing a LoRa solution over cellular? The answer is 75% in savings for data transmission costs alone. That means using a data plan from one of the big telecom players the data cost on a yearly budget was forecasted for $398,000. With the LoRaWAN network the forecasted cost is $90,000 which saves $318,000 on annual data plan costs as well as increase compliance from food vendors. About Us Chenoa Information Services, Inc. is a U.S. based software development company leading the way with innovative solutions that improve quality and increase efficiencies for our clients. We were founded in 1998 and have a development center in Mumbai, India with about 600 employees worldwide. Chenoa is an Azure Gold Partner with Microsoft. For more information visit our website or send us an Website: mfortino@chenoainc.com Phone: ext.209

7 IoT Partners Senet provides the first public Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) for the rapidly growing Internet of Things (IoT) market in North America. Low Power Wide Area Networks are the key to unlock the enormous potential of IoT solutions. Experts estimate that over 55% of the IoT market will be best suited to LPWAN connectivity. LPWANs enable value driven solutions which can unlock immediate ROI by enabling devices to connect over very long ranges (~15 miles) while delivering very long battery power life (~10 years) with an extremely low power-device cost. Low cost, low-power and secure, the Senet Network has distinct advantages over cellular, WiFi, and other emerging connectivity technologies for the IoT market. Senetco GlobalSat WorldCom Corp is manufacturer of GPS receivers and electronic communications in the world. GlobalSat has refined its core product lines to GPS applications, which consist of GPS Tracking System (GSM/GPRS/SMS communication with GPS/A-GPS), Wrist Type GPS Personal Training Devices, GPS Engine Boards/Modules, All-In-One Car Navigator, Bluetooth GPS, Cable GPS, SDIO/Compact Flash GPS, and GPS System Integration. GlobalSat Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing service created by Microsoft for building, testing, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoftmanaged data centers. It provides software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service and infrastructure as a service and supports many different programming languages, tools and frameworks, including both Microsoft-specific and third-party software and systems.