Moscow Boosts Public Vehicle Efficiency With Internet of Things Technology

The Moscow Government’s Department of Information Technologies (DIT) IoT system is tracking the locations and status of 22,000 vehicles throughout the Russian city, to automate dispatching and thereby reduce fuel overconsumption; next, it plans to examine the possibility of tracking vehicle driver activity via wristbands or brain-wave sensors.

The system, which employs onboard sensors using satellite location and cellular transmission, has reduced the rate of vehicle breakdowns to almost zero, the city reports, and has saved the city budget approximately $162,000 monthly by reducing fuel consumption. That cost is equivalent to buying two new snow plows every month. The system was taken live this year, following several years of planning and testing.

The solution tracks the locations and movements of everything from street sweepers and snow plows to garbage trucks and water carts. In this way, the technology captures data required to understand speed, fuel consumption and how each vehicle is being operated.

The GLONASS-based sensors transmit encrypted data to the Department of Housing and Communal Services and Improvement of Moscow’s dispatch center server via a cellular transmission, using telemetric services provided by Rostelecom. The data is transmitted at the rate of approximately 1,300 packets per second, or 110 million packets per day. That information can then be managed and viewed by authorities at the dispatch center, as well as by Moscow’s mayor and other officials.

“The GLOSNASS satellites transmit the signal, thus identifying the location of each vehicle,” Belozerov states. “When the vehicle is on the move, the [system] is monitoring the speed or direction changes. When the vehicle stops, we get the data every 20 minutes.”

Almost as soon as the system was taken live, Mother Nature challenged its functionality. During one February weekend, Moscow experienced the highest precipitation on record: 17 inches, the same amount that the city more typically sees throughout a full month. That meant the heavy use of city vehicles—in fact, more than 15,500 were used to clear away 1.2 million cubic meters (42.4 million cubic feet) of snow. It was what Belozerov calls a real “crash test for the new system.”