Design and reliability analysis on internet-based real-time fuel consumption reporting system

Abstract

The objectives of this study are (i) to design and fabricate the internet-based real-time fuel consumption reporting system and (ii) to evaluate reliability of the reporting system. Real-time fuel consumption rate of the testing vehicle which was measured from fuel injector control signal by the real-time fuel consumption meter proposed in the previously research was used to be the data for reporting by the internet-based real-time fuel consumption reporting system fabricated in this study. A universal asynchronous receiver transmitter (UART) protocol which is a computer hardware device for synchronous serial communication was used to communicate and transmit data between devices and operation of the system was controlled by the Arduino Mega 2560 microcontroller. Then, the Quectel BC95-B8 module was used to transmit data for recording on virtual database through narrow band internet of thing (NB-IoT) technology which operates in the 900-MHz frequency band. The results could be concluded that (i) the average fuel consumption rate shown on the ThingsBoard application was less than the calculated fuel consumption for about 11.6% due to number and duration of disconnection of the NB-IoT module. (ii) When data is remotely observed via internet connection, it was found that the data displayed in the database has a lag time for less than 9 seconds due to latency of data transmission system. From these points, the system proposed in this study was acceptably to be installed onto truck fleet in private or small-scale carriers for real-time monitoring and internal data collecting applications. However, reliability in data communication and additional feature to reduce data losing were strongly recommended to be applied on the system before it could be extended to be used in larger scale carriers.