REMOTE DIAGNOSTICS – FICTION OR REALITY?

Remember Minority Report? It was a 2002 Steven Spielberg film starring Tom Cruise which served as a two-hour and forty-five-minute science fiction block buster doubling as a Lexus concept car commercial. The premise of Minority report for those who do not remember is the ability to predict crime and prevent it before it even happened. Of course, this was applied to humans and (spoiler alert for a twenty-one-year-old film) it all went haywire. The future Minority report tells us about occurs in 2054 and who knows, maybe it may possibly happen (everything goes nowadays).

Now, the fact that something went wrong in a sci-fi movie does not mean we cannot create a real benefit for society now, thirty-one years before the fictional events of said film.
We can certainly apply the notion of prevention when it comes to the machines we create, the same machines modern society relies on. This is where the reality of this crossover comes to fruition. Machines break. OK? Let’s get this out of the way first. When machines break, they cause inconveniences for people, businesses and you generally do not want that. This is kind of acceptable when you are talking about someone’s private vehicle – be it a car or motorcycle, sure, it will be a nuisance to the owner but (not to be cynical) it will not be a critical problem for society. However, if we take the critical machines, we all rely on – police cars, ambulances, fire trucks, public transportation and we apply the principles of logging their behavior and create (as we already have) a software which analyses the detailed parameters of every step within the machine’s behavior to prevent it from ever breaking down when it is needed. If that sounds a bit Big brother to you – I get it, but the reality of the matter is that it is needed. You need to be able to rely on essential vehicles 24/7, 365 and that is it. Of course regulations apply to what is reasonable and what is acceptable.

Of course, emergency services are just the tip of the iceberg because the application of such a solution are virtually endless. For example, if you own a rent-a-car company you can know the exact location of all your cars, monitor if something is wrong with them, see if someone is speeding, set limitations and basically never worry about anyone exploiting your cars incorrectly. If you own a building company you can monitor the work process of your trucks, cranes and all the building equipment you possess. In case you own a shipping company you can monitor the location, speed, idle time of your trucks, vans… It is virtually endless.

A couple of years ago we started developing a fleet management solution for remote diagnostics which we called CARMON. CARMON is the next generation of fleet management and here is what it can do for you:

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• Remote diagnostics – You can monitor live values remotely, you can scan, analyze, and clear diagnostic trouble codes. All this can be applied to avoid stopping your business, improving the predictability of items breaking and predicting whenever servicing is needed proactively. If your operators see that a vehicle is overheating, they can notify the driver and bring them in for servicing, they can deploy a replacement vehicle and avoid obstructions in your vehicles’ workflow thus preventing money loss for you.
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• Geofencing – in case the vehicles in your fleet should not leave a certain area, for example if you have a rent-a-car business in Miami and you do not want people going to Fort Lauderdale in your cars you can simply put a notification into the app and get a notification whenever your cars leave the perimeter you have set.
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• Working hours – using CARMON you can monitor idle times, see how long your drivers need to wait, how long cranes or diggers are inoperable and how much time is spent just waiting in traffic. This allows for fleet optimization and cost savings like never before.
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• For both internal combustion engines and electric vehicles you can optimize fuel and electricity consumption, create optimal routes and have data driven conclusions about the way you operate your fleet.

• Combining the above provides you the ability to predict breakdowns, eliminate distance issues, reduce downtime, make informed decisions based on data analysis and always keep your business moving forward. This is one of the values we at Abrites hold, we allow people, businesses, and vehicles to keep moving forward.

• We already have a few pilot projects where we are perfecting our solution and we will soon be able to provide you with the results of those. We are working with our local public transport company to optimize electric buses and assist them in improving all of the above thus creating a better, more efficient service.

These are just some examples to help understand the way we want to do fleet management and remote diagnostics. We want to have the ability to turn fiction into reality – resolve issues remotely, predict problems before they even happen and create the perfect solution for any fleet. This is why I believe that dystopian fiction of Minority report can be turned into an utopian reality for any business using vehicles to operate.

If you are interested in learning how we can assist your fleet – please get in touch with us.
See you guys next week, please make sure to share your thoughts with us via the blog@abrites.com email address.