India has witnessed significant economic growth pursuant to its liberalisation from early Nineties. Among the key infrastructure sectors that are receiving attention, transportation sector has been widely recognised as one of the key engines of economic and technological growth in the country. With a 7%+ GDP growth seen in the current years in the Indian economy, the transportation sector has consequently assumed greater focus of development in India. A quick view of the following figures would provide the scale of these developments:

• Road Transport
• 5 Million vehicles manufactured annually
• 3,500,000 Kms. road network
• 3 Million commercial trucks on the roads.
• Nearly 2 Million Four-wheelers added on the roads annually

The Golden Quadrilateral project, the Prime Minister’s village road plan (PMGSY), National Highway Authority’s expansion programmes, increase in Toll roads, and, private sector participation have all contributed to the growth in the road transport network. Consequently, the logistic market in India alone has been estimated to constitute around 13% of the GDP. However, it is clear that the efficiency and safety of the road transportation system overall would directly impact this growth.

Technology plays an important role in this. Technologies of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), Vehicle Telematics, RF identification, Vehicle Tracking System (VTS), Satellite and Wireless Communication, Autonomous Navigation with global navigation satellite system (GNSS) and Imaging, etc., have been widely recognised to help improve efficiency and safety of road transport.

The major road transport users concerned with these technologies in India can be categorised as below:

• Security agencies (Police, Border Security Force, etc.)
• Military cross-country moving vehicles
• Call Centre transporters
• CitiCab services (Metropolitan and Tier-II cities)
• Utility vehicles (Municipalities, Hospitals, Airports, Airlines, Banks, etc.)
• Commercial transporters (Inter-city trucking)
• Public transport (intra-city & inter-city)
• Mines, Earth-moving equipment vehicles, etc

GPS as prolific example of GNSS, is a satellite based navigation system, introduced by the U S Department of Defense, to simplify navigation in unknown areas, and meet diverse position location requirements. Apart from the originally stipulated Military usage, the GPS today supports a host of Civil applications, including the very critical ones like aviation, worldwide. Vehicle Tracking System (VTS), or Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) system as popularly called, is another good example of civil use of GPS.

GPS uses satellites and ground tracking computers in conjunction with a user receiver to compute user position by the triangulation method utilising the received satellite signals. GPS comprises of a constellation of 24 circular orbit satellites, with a visibility of 8 satellites from any part of the earth at a given time.