An End-to-End Logistics Management Application Over Heterogeneous Location Systems

RFID and GPS are the two technologies that receive significant attention in the field of indoor and outdoor location systems, respectively. In this research, the need of integrating multiple heterogeneous location systems is identified. We propose a hybrid system that combines both RFID and GPS technologies to achieve the goal of true end-to-end logistics management, by end-to-end we mean the journey of goods delivery may traverse across both indoor and outdoor regions. With our system, not only a manager can dispatch tasks for the deliverymen, but also the real-time location of a deliveryman can be tracked both indoors and outdoors. More importantly, the deliveryman with a mobile terminal can experience seamless positioning handover between outdoor and indoor environments. The usefulness of this logistics management application is verified through an experiment conducted in the campus environment. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that implements RFID and GPS positioning handover in the application of end-to-end logistics management.