Fleet management is the work of knowing where each of a company's vehicles is, how it is being driven, when it needs service and how much fuel it burns. A school runs buses. A courier company runs hundreds of delivery vans. A trucking company runs thousands of lorries across the country. A company's set of vehicles is called its fleet.
Without this knowledge, a fleet owner cannot see a lorry that has stood for three hours, a driver who speeds, diesel that is being sold on the way, or an engine that is about to fail. These cost money, and some of them cost lives.
Each vehicle carries a telematics device, a small box with GPS, sensors and a SIM card. It reports the vehicle's location, speed, harsh braking, idling, fuel use and engine faults. It reads many of these from the vehicle's electronic control unit. The idea of sending vehicle data to a remote computer is called telematics. In India, such a tracking box is also a legal requirement for many buses and taxis, under a standard called AIS-140.
The reports reach fleet management software, which gathers every vehicle on one screen, plans routes, schedules maintenance and coaches drivers. Fleets pay a monthly fee for each vehicle, plus the cost of the devices.
More and more fleets add an AI dash cam, a camera that watches the road and the driver. It uses edge computing, meaning the AI runs on the camera itself, so it can warn a driver in the moment.
Take, for example, a fleet manager at a courier company in Hyderabad with 300 vans. The box in each van sends its position and speed. On the manager's screen, one van shows 9,800 km since its last service, so she books it for the workshop. Another van shows a driver who brakes harshly many times a day, so she schedules a coaching session. Fuel is paid for with a fuel card, which the same software can check against the van's route. The three layers of device, app and cloud are described in IoT architecture.