Advanced pickup & delivery of parcels using GPS/GIS technologies

The main focus of this project addresses some of the key problems in the postal industry which are adhoc pickups, efficient and quick delivery, increase in vehicle maintenance, overtime and fuel cost. Companies involved in postal industry are spending millions of extra dollars to fulfill customer’s need. There is a need of some reliable solution which can help improving the existing processes which are still using old technologies. This project uses advanced and reliable state of the art technologies like Global Positioning System (GPS) and Geographical Information System (GIS) to improve the existing process of Pickup and Delivery (P&D) of parcels which are the two fundamental services provided by the postal industry. Today, there is a huge competition and the companies involved in postal industry are allocating a lot of budget to provide better, improved, reliable and satisfactory service to the customers. This project presents an integrated approach to combine GPS and GIS to help improving the existing pickup/delivery process. A GPS enabled mobile device capable of wireless connectivity can be mounted in the courier’s vehicle. The existing shipment and tracking application can be modified to communicate to GPS and transmit GPS data to the server wirelessly. GIS functionality can be embedded in the server side to calculate the shortest route between the courier’s current position and the customer address. Similarly, digital maps can be used for visual display of the couriers and their online activities.